CardCarryingMember

I'm Guest Blogging...

2007-03-09T17:19:00.000-05:00

....over at PrawfsBlawg, which is a law blog. Until they throw me off that blog, I'll be posting there.

For those of you who don't know, I'm a visiting prof at the College of Law at Florida State University this academic year (I know, I know--I'm an economist....but I'm interested in law, too, and FSU has a budding institutional interest in law & econ/empirical studies).

Another piece of news: starting this coming fall, I'm moving to the Univ of Arizona's Eller College of Management, where I'll be teaching in the econ department. I'll miss my posse at Maryland, but I'm very excited about this new move.

I'll write more when I can...I'm sure both of you miss me....

Amen

2007-01-31T15:24:00.000-05:00

A State of the Union response delivered by a four-year-old.
Let's make her the Decider.

We're Running!

2007-01-23T09:04:00.000-05:00

With the spate of announcements over the last week, the news is full of stories about the fundraising primary and how fierce the competition has gotten.

So, after weekend consultations with our key adviser, the politically prominent Margo Charley Shaw, spacegirl and I have decided to declare our candidacy. That's right:

We're Running for co-President!

Details of our platform will follow....

Frontiers of Self-Parody

2007-01-17T15:48:00.000-05:00

Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse.

Misimpressions and Questions of Integrity

2007-01-17T15:31:00.000-05:00

They really should fire the guy. But, you know, they're the Bush Administration.

For further edification, read this post over at Balkin, especially starting with the 6th paragraph.

Double-Talk Express: A Video Montage

2007-01-17T15:25:00.000-05:00

Those of you who still think John McCain will be a formidable candidate for President in 2008 might take a look at this....

Five Minutes to Midnight

2007-01-17T11:16:00.000-05:00

In case you thought only you and a bunch of other damn dirty hippies believe the world is going to Hell in a Humvee, take comfort in the company of scientists.

Nuclear war has never been closer. On the plus side, um, the jury is evidently still out on "science."

Minimum Wages and Small-Business Tax Breaks

2007-01-11T09:15:00.000-05:00

Lots of talk in the news about the min wage after yesterday's big margin in the House to increase it. By all accounts, the Senate will be a tougher sell given the greater powers of the minority there.
News reports suggest that the price of passing the bill in the Senate will be adding tax breaks for small businesses.

I don't know the details of these tax breaks, so I don't have an opinion about whether they're a good idea.

But one very interesting economic point seems not to have been discussed. The usual rationale among opponents^* of minimum wage increases is that they will cause disemployment. Binding price floors do indeed cause surpluses this in competitive markets, and the model these opponents have in mind for the labor market is the competitive model. Thus disemployment is the same as a surplus of available labor at the binding minimum wage. Now, there is considerable evidence that any disemployment effects are small. (In fact, some empirical work suggests zero or even positive employment effects, which could happen when the labor market is not competitive, with employers having some market power---my understanding is that the jury on this question is still out.)

But suppose we thought that disemployment effects were substantial. Then the argument for the minimum wage is that one values the gains to the winners---via higher wages---more than the losses to the (job) losers.

What do small business tax breaks do to ameliorate such disemployment? Well, that will depends on whether those tax breaks tend to increase the value of the marginal revenue (VMR) produced by the firms' workers. This is true because in a competitive labor market, a firm's labor demand curve is the same as its VMR curve. At one extreme, a reduction in the tax rate on firms' profits would, indeed, shift the VMR curve up, since it would increase the after-tax value of a sale at a given pre-tax price. At the other extreme, just dumping money on these firms (economists use the term "helicopter drop") would basically do nothing to employment levels---yes, it would increase the value of the firm, but it wouldn't affect optimal employment levels.

Thus it seems possible that there are two different questions here. One is, what are these tax breaks really about--minimizing disemployment effects that worry minimum wage opponents, or simply transferring wealth to firm owners?

Second, is there any reason to transfer wealth to firm owners? If the low-wage labor market is indeed competitive (so that there are disemployment effects), then firms make zero economic profits in equilibrium. Thus the only reason for low-wage employers to care about the minimum wage would be that it reduces the value of their sunk capital. Giving helicopter-droppish tax breaks to offset such a reduction might seem fair--why should small businesses handle the redistributive burden of the minimum wage--but doing so ultimately involves transferring dollars from taxpayers as a whole to these specific ones. Depending on what the set of affected small business owners look like in wealth terms, this policy could be either desirable or undesirable on equity grounds.

I don't know this literature well, but it would be interesting to know if anyone has looked at
this second question.

David and George in Wonderland

2007-01-11T09:02:00.000-05:00

Today is one of those days when you read the first sentence of David Brooks's column---

If the Democrats don’t like the U.S. policy on Iraq over the next six months, they have themselves partly to blame.

---and realize that yes, there is at least one other person as delusional as the president when it comes to Iraq policy.

Brooks goes on to explain his rationale:

There were millions of disaffected Republicans and independents ready to coalesce around some alternative way forward, but the Democrats never came up with anything remotely serious.

Consider the underlying logic of this position. At base it's very simple: if the Democrats had come up with a "remotely serious" alternative to the President's plan to stay-the-course, send-more-troops to Iraq (never mind the commanders on the ground after all!) or however you want to describe it, then somehow--somehow--George W. Bush magically would have seen the light, been convinced by Democratic seriousness, and adopted their plan.

Yeah, right.

Just consider this excerpt from the NYT's front page article on Bush's speech last night:

[The president] put it far more bluntly when leaders of Congress visited the White House earlier on Wednesday. “I said to Maliki this has to work or you’re out,” the president told the Congressional leaders, according to two officials who were in the room. Pressed on why he thought this strategy would succeed where previous efforts had failed, Mr. Bush shot back: “Because it has to.”

There you go. We're pursuing a policy. Why will it work? Because it has to.

Once again: We are pursuing because it has to work.

The Democrats have done lots wrong on Iraq and plenty of other things. But come on. This is---even partly---the Democrats' fault?

I...DON'T...Feel Good

2006-12-26T10:20:00.000-05:00

George W. Bush feels unfunky in the wake of James Brown's passing. White House press shop drafts lame memorial statement to mark the godfather's death.

No such luck finding any statements marking another grim passage -- the number of U.S. personnel dead in Iraq now exceeds the 9-11 death count.

Heckuva job, Nukie

2006-12-14T12:17:00.000-05:00

If you don’t pay attention to nuclear weapon security, you may not know about Pantex. Located in Amarillo, Texas, Pantex’s mission is straightforward: “Maintaining the safety, security and reliability of America’s nuclear weapons stockpile.’’

Turns out they’re doing that, well, not so good anymore. Pantex, an arm of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is itself nominally part of the Department of Energy, is plagued by senior management that is blind to problems, deaf to criticism and unwilling to change in the face of serious security concerns raised by Pantex staff.

Stubbornly, willfully ignorant leadership? In this administration? Shocked, shocked, etc., etc…

A letter delivered to Pantex’s board Nov. 10 -- after the election, to avoid any allegations of 11th hour political point-scoring, according to the authors -- raises serious concerns about Pantex’s performance of late. The authors are anonymous but claim to represent some 189 years of Pantex experience. A copy of the letter was provided to CHB via a contact who occasionally works with the staff at the Project on Government Oversight.

Senior management suffers ``a failure to be self-critical, reinforcing the message that problems do not exist or are being adequately addressed. Organization oversight weaknesses with a lack of clarity in roles and responsibilities contributing to most events and, most deadly of all, there is a belief that plant performance is good even when this is no longer true, creating complacency, over-confidence, and isolation.’’

The allegations include increased work loads on smaller, less trained staff -- supervised by management that sometimes lacks the training to even understand precisely what they're supposed to be managing. Alarmingly, one claim alludes to product being shipped to the Pentagon before all Pantex procedures are completed -- it's alarming largely because the letter is silent to what isn't being done before powerfully dangerous stuff is sent to the rational, sane folks over at DoD.

The nation’s first MBA President long ago forgot the business school dictum that the bar of professionalism is set at the top.

This is serious, even if it is something like Chapter MMMCLXVII in the epic book of Bush Administration Incompetence. As we all begin digesting more and more pre-2008 presidential hoopla, remember how deep the whole W dug is -- and how much time and effort it will take to fix this mess that has spilled across virtually every government agency.

Making Paper Assets Worth Something

2006-12-03T16:06:00.000-05:00

In my last post, I commented on M.P. Dunleavey's page-B6 "Basic Instincts" column in yesterday's NYT Business section (entitled "Plan to Retire But Leave Out Social Security"). That post concerned the Chicken-Little silliness of her column's main point ("Omigosh! My Social Security Statement says the trust fund will run out in 2040! Better assume I'll get Zero!!")

In reading Dunleavey's column, I had a couple thoughts that I hadn't had before. A key part of the political attack on Social Security last year was the canard that the bonds it has accrued since the 1983 Greenspan Commission's Report (filled with raving leftists, as you can tell by its having been chaired by Alan Greenspan) recommended that the system "save" for the purposes of dealing with the future costs of the Baby Boomers' retirement. Congress enacted and President Reagan signed legislation that implemented key elements of this report. Most relevantly for this post, the payroll tax was increased so that the system could accrue assets meant to be sufficient to defray the costs of the Boomers' retirement at a time when there would be fewer workers per retiree, and so on. In other words, the Greenspan Commission contemplated exactly the challenges we faced. We find ourselves in our current situation because the total value of bonds that will have accrued from the tax increases recommended by the Commission turned out to be insufficient to meet the program's shortfall through 2056 (which was the long run horizon that the Commission was charged with addressing). As I understand things, this inadequacy is primarily due to an unexpected slowdown in wage growth (benefit levels for current retirees are insensitive to current tax revenues, which are themselves determined by total earnings up to a per-individual cap, which was $90,000 last year).

There is no question that the Social Security system faces a shortfall and that something should be done about it (I tend to favor some version of the Diamond-Orszag plan, about which I will perhaps write in the future). But the sky-is-falling crowd has made an especially large bale of hay out of the supposed vulnerability of the special bonds that the Social Security Trust Funds have been accruing since the Greenspan Commission-induced surpluses commenced. Simply put, here are the basic facts:

At present, the Social Security system takes in more in revenues than it pays out in benefits. (This situation has gone on for 2 decades and will continue for the next 11 or so years, even if no changes are made.)
By law, the resulting surpluses must be invested in special Treasury bonds. Thus, the Social Security Trust Funds are required to invest in low-yield assets (perhaps I'll discuss the bonds-versus-stocks issue, and its general irrelevance, another time).
Those bonds are backed by the usual "full faith and credit of the United States government" promise.
Nonetheless, some proponents of structural changes---i.e., partial or full privatization---of Social Security have tried hard to convince the public that "There is no 'trust fund,' just IOUs that I saw firsthand," as President Bush said during a visit to the Bureau of the Public Debt in April 2005.

The worthless-pieces-of-paper PR strategy has probably made headway with some people. And, as Olivia Mitchell of Wharton is rightly quoted as saying in Dunleavey's column, "the Treasury goes ahead and spends that money, so although there is a promise, nobody knows where the money will come from to pay them back."

Mitchell's point is commonly made, and it is certainly correct. Which brings me to the couple of thoughts I had reading Dunleavey's column yesterday:

Suppose we accept, as President Bush and some of his backers claim, that the Social Security Trust Funds' assets are particularly worthless since they are simply promises by one part of the government to pay another. Then, the system can pay promised benefits only if Congress and the President are willing, as the President also said in his visit to the Bureau of the Public Debt, to enact policies so that "future generations will pay [for these IOUs]...either in higher taxes, or reduced benefits, or cuts to other critical government programs." So we are accepting that the system's assets are not really assets at all---not in the sense that a government or corporate bond you or I might own is an asset. With such an asset, we simply sell or cash it in and receive its value. Barring bankruptcy of the issuing entity, we will certainly be paid. By contrast, on the accepted line of reasoning, when the Social Security Trust Fund tries to redeem its "assets" from the U.S. Treasury, the Treasury can simply say, "Ix-nay on the Asset Pay", since presumably the "higher taxes, or reduced benefits, or cuts to other criticial government programs" may simply be too politically unpopular. Thus these assets are more hope than plan.

But if that is true, then there is not really any Social Security system at all! Social Security is then just another line item in the government's budget. There happens to be a tax "dedicated" to it, but benefits continue regardless of that tax's revenue, anyway. So why shouldn't we equally doubt, say, the Pentagon's ability to get its budget, or the department of transportation, and so on? Hey, why assume that the wealthiest Americans can continue to count on the reduced taxes Congress and the President have bestowed on them? No particular reason, none at all. Social Security's political defenders should start making the case that if there is no Trust Fund as such---if the Greenspan Commission was just a con---then there is no reason to treat Social Security as a special program. If those assets aren't really assets at all, then there really isn't a relevantly separate Social Security program, either. Of course this is really quite silly---of course there is a program, one in whose name quite a bit has been promised. That is why we need a way to enforce the legally binding nature of those bonds. So how to do that?
Quite simply.
1. First, change the legal status of the Social Security Administration to a private, non-profit corporation that is legally charged with meeting benefits under current policy (including the provision about automatic cuts should full benefit payment make the system insolvent).
2. Second, require the federal government to direct all relevant payroll tax revenues (i.e., the 12.4 percent part, for you wonks) into the coffers of this private corporation.
3. Third, have Congress convert all those special bonds into bonds that are legally indistinguishable from ones purchased at public auctions.
If we took this step, there would no longer be any way to default specifically on bonds held by the Social Security system without defaulting on all sorts of bonds. Those worthless pieces of paper would be indistinguishable from all the other full-faith-and-credit ones held by private individuals and corporations (and foreign governments). I'm not an expert on these details, but I'm betting this plan would pass constitutional muster (see "Reserve System, Federal" for a similar case). It would also have the substantial virtue of (a) making good on the Greenspan Commission's, Congress's, and President Reagan's promises, and (b) forcing politicians to focus on the real issue, which is about benefits and tax revenues, and eliminating the legalistic debate over the status of duly lent money.

Plan on Fixing SS, But Leave Out Dunleavey

2006-12-03T15:13:00.000-05:00

During last year's debate, a lot was written about Social Security's future and the problems the system faces. So it's unsurprising that there's little (nothing?) new in M.P. Dunleavey's page-B6 "Basic Instincts" column in yesterday's NYT Business section (entitled "Plan to Retire But Leave Out Social Security"). But in reading Dunleavey's column, I had a couple thoughts that I hadn't had before. I'll put those thoughts in my next post; before I get to them, let me dispense with a point of confusion that Dunleavey causes in building her column around the Social Security statement she recently received.

Early in the column, she quotes her statement and then comments thusly:

"Unless action is taken soon to strengthen Social Security, in just 11 years we will begin paying more in benefits than we collect in taxes," the letter said. "Without changes, by 2040 the Social Security Trust Fund will be exhausted.

Exhausted? I've been fairly pessimistic about the future of Social Security and tend to side with those who recommend not counting on those benefits when calculating one's retirement. But I thought the Social Security Administration itself might hold out more hope for its own future---let alone yours and mine.

This quotation is silly. First of all, there's no news in the supposed news, and it's hard to imagine that after last year's extended discussions on Social Security, anyone reading the inside pages of the NYT Business section on a Saturday could be unaware of the general fact that the Social Security system faces a shortfall years from now. Worse, though, is Dunleavey's apparent suggestion that without policy changes, Social Security will simply disappear ("tend to side with those who recommend not counting on those benefits when calculating one's retirement").

As I understand current law, if the trust fund cannot pay all benefits promised-by-formula, everyone's benefit will simply be scaled down to an amount such that the system remains solvent. Thus the relevant question is not when the trust fund will be "exhausted", but the fraction of promised benefits that the system will be able to pay when it is no longer able to pay all promised benefits. According to a May 2005 Social Security Statement, when the trust fund is exhausted "there will be enough money to pay only about 74 cents for each dollar of scheduled benefits." This is not good, but it's a lot closer to 100 cents than it is to 0.

Dunleavey does cite this fact much later in her column, but even then only to criticize the way promised benefits are presented. Her beef is that "the dollar amounts of the individual benefits printed in your statement and mine are still the full amounts." But if the statement reported the 74 percent figure, then there wouldn't be any exhaustion problem. Either there's a terrible problem or there isn't.

Dunleavey concludes as follows:

Many people stopped counting on Social Security as part of their planning long ago. But many others who still have their fingers crossed need to let go of the fantasy and make better financial plans. Trust me, I read it in my Social Security statement.

This conclusion seeks so to substitute dramatic effect for empirical relevance. I'm unsurprised to see someone make such claims. But I'm seriously bothered that it somehow wound up published in the NYT Business section. Shame on the editors.

Nick Kristof's Column Today

2006-12-03T13:11:00.000-05:00

I really respect Nicholas Kristof. He's done a ton to keep the tragic genocide in Darfur in the news, and he usually brings an interesting take on the more-frequently covered topics about which he writes. His writing on aid and Africa has made me more aware of the good work that some evangelical groups do there. More than once, such columns of his have reminded me that not all---perhaps few---evangelicals fit into the box of rabid, loud hate that has become so typical of the Axis of Intolerance that seems to have had such a strong grip on the Republican Party lo these last years.

One thing about such columns is they make you realize that intolerance for those whose leaders are loudly intolerant isn't a virtue. To that effect, I think Kristof has a point about the tone of recent secular attacks on religiosity as such. Kristof's column today focuses on and cricitizes Richard Dawkins's website Why Won't God Heal Amputees?:

That’s a snarky site that notes that while people regularly credit God for curing cancer or other ailments, amputees never seem to enjoy divine intervention.

“If God were answering the prayers of amputees to regenerate their lost limbs, we would be seeing amputated legs growing back every day,” the Web site declares, adding: “It would appear, to an unbiased observer, that God is singling out amputees and purposefully ignoring them.”

That site is part of an increasingly assertive, often obnoxious atheist offensive led in part by Professor Dawkins — the Oxford scientist who is author of the new best seller “The God Delusion.” It’s a militant, in-your-face brand of atheism that he and others are proselytizing for.

I confess to more than my share of off-the-cuff remarks that aren't entirely charitable to true-believers. Nonetheless, I strive to be more tolerant of people who are devoted to their faiths. Personally I think it's up to individuals to decide the ultimate truths to which they want to subscribe. I make this point because, while I haven't read Dawkins's book, I understand (from both Kristof's article and a friend who has read it) that much of his goal is to convince the faithful that they are wrong on empirical matters and thus should abandon faith. Hence Dawkins's website on amputees---which, based on a couple minutes of perusal, I think is considerably more thoughtful and earnest in its engaging of believers than Kristof gives him.

Personally I think Dawkins's point---that faith cannot be justified on empirical grounds---is neither surprising (I think that statement is either tautological or self-evident, in case there's a distinction between these two concepts) nor likely to convince many reflective theists. The fact that Dawkins has cleverly found an example that challenges---indeed, appears to negate---the literal text of the Bible doesn't really change this fact. There's such a thing as artistic license, and I'm guessing that many sincere theists see the literal quotes that Dawkins cites in that light.

Nonetheless, I'm glad that Dawkins is lodging this particular challenge. Worldwide, we're in the midst of ongoing attempts by religious fundamentalists to turn back the clock on liberal (that's "liberal" in the classical sense) rights. Here in the US, we've suffered through years of an ascendant religious right filled with intolerant, uncivil and---in at least some high-profile cases---hypocritical mullahs who think it's their business to tell the rest of us how to live. Inevitably their reasoning seems to come down to religious principles in general, with the Bible in particular often cited. If Dawkins's challenge forces at least some people to confront evident contradictions in the Bible's text, then so much the better.

Now, I haven't followed Dawkins's recent efforts, or those of his allies, enough to know whether Kristof is justified in referring to their tone and wording as constituting "irreligious intolerance". If so, I wish they'd not take that approach---both because it's intolerant and because it's unlikely to be very helpful.

But they have every right to make the arguments they're making, arguments that apparently need to be joined in a society where a Jew chosen to be the Democratic nominee for Vice President can earnestly and publicly say

As a people we need to reaffirm our faith and renew the dedication of our nation and ourselves to God and God's purpose.

He also questioned the idea "that morality can be maintained without religion". (Kudos to the ADL for calling him out on this one; if memory serves, Lieberman later said he didn't mean to suggest he believed what he'd said.) And let's not forget Jerry Falwell's tour-de-force, so heartily joined by Pat Robertson.

Having said all that, I plead dumbfoundedness to this statement by Kristof:

Now that the Christian Right has largely retreated from the culture wars, let’s hope that the Atheist Left doesn’t revive them.

Huh? The Christian Right has largely retreated from the culture wars?

With anti-gay-marriage referenda passing in something like 7 states (though not in Arizona) this past election, with the attempts by the White House to direct federal funding to religious groups, with all the noxious stuff that the political representatives of the religious right say these days, where does Kristof get this idea? I know that there are some fringe folk on the "Christian Right" (Paul Weyrich is one, if memory serves) who have decided to drop the partisan-politics approach to the "culture war". But I don't think that means he/they are eschewing the "culture wars" in general.

Perhaps Kristof means that, since the Democrats took both houses of Congress, voters are currently less in the thrall of the "Christian Right". Well, if so, then he should recognize that the "retreat" isn't due to some self-reflective decision to stop with the intolerance. No, it's due to the fact that their ideas aren't all that popular.

We've fallen, and can't get up...

2006-12-01T09:10:00.000-05:00

The Iraq Study Group’s final report due for release next week promises to be nothing less than the sheet music Nero fiddled from. Iraq is a lost cause. Truly the only question remaining is how many MORE Iraqis we screw over before totally abandoning our Mesopotamian extreme makeover.

Excuse another classical reference, but we really could’ve used a Hadrian instead of a Nero -- a leader intent on consolidating international gains and refining infrastructure instead of a spoiled delinquent deaf to reason.

If you can’t see the immediate reason why this is so (the death and loss of American credibility being only among the most obvious in a long, glaring list) the future is as clear as wonton soup.

The American model of foreign policy -- of linking international benefits to approved behaviors -- has had its century. The Chinese model -- of striking deals over resources and trade alone, without any regard to political concessions or some eggheaded nicety like human rights -- is ascendant. Bush played usher to this incipient shift.

China’s courtship of Africa, or more particularly African resources, began this fall with a bang. China has begun its sunshine campaign in South America. The world is already orienting itself around a new economic order.

China doesn’t care much who you jail, abuse or deny voting rights to. It only wants to strike a deal for the raw materials your country possesses.

Conveniently enough, the U.S. is utterly dependent on the Chinese to buy American debt and sustain our profligate budgetary habits. As China grows more powerful, we grow more dependent on their bond-buying. The Chinese aren’t stupid -- they’d much rather buy our debt than our goods, no matter how much we beg. Sort of puts Clinton's obsession with the bond market in perspective, doesn't it...

Are Baker, Hamilton and the rest happy to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic? And the nation patiently waits and watches for what kind of arrangement they come up with?

"Do As I Say (Not as I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy"

2006-11-29T17:23:00.000-05:00

That's the title of Hoover Institution fellow Peter Schwezer's most recent book (according to his Hoover bio).

Interesting, then, to read this post at ThinkProgress.

Not that there isn't a distinction between hypocricy and indifference to factual accuracy. There is. But it's too bad that Mr. Schweizer lobs charges on the former using the cloak of the latter.

An Ill Wind Blows for the Good Doctor

2006-11-29T11:29:00.000-05:00

The announcement likely today that Bill Frist won't run for President is some evidence that Frist may be more aware of reality than was apparent. Frist's slow, grinding, public descent into POTUS-possibility irrelevance was the mirror image of George Allen's shockingly fast fall from possible frontrunner to Senator-un-elect.

Watching Frist, all I could think was, does this guy really think he has a shot at the nomination? Any dumbfool can see he doesn't have a chance -- his woodenness makes you think Al Gore got it from something in the Tennessee water, and why would the religious right support Frist when they'll have so actual true-believers available (even with Allen and frothy Santorum gone, think Brownback, and so on). Yet off he would go to the Senate floor, day-after-other-day, to do their bidding. He did stand up on the bill to provide federal financing of embryonic stem-cell research, but that was the exception that so glaringly proved the rule.

For me, the twin confirmations of Frist's venal 2008-oriented self-sale to the religious right were

the spectacle of this highly trained surgeon refusing, in a televised interview with George Stephanopoulos, to debunk the claim that AIDS can be spread via sweat and tears, and, of course
his preposterous diagnosis-by-videotape of a neurology patient (imagine a neurologist performing a heart transplant!) in the service of enacting a federal law to force judicial intervention in a family-law dispute.

Dr. Frist, indeed.

The Shark Jumps Itself

2006-11-21T16:19:00.000-05:00

I really can't add anything to the basic statement of facts over at TPM.

Eat This (or: Subjectio Ergo Sum)

2006-11-16T12:44:00.000-05:00

Set down the victory champagne. He's still in charge -- as are his ideological minions seeded across the government.

W isn't about to go bipartisan when there's still so much compassionate conservatism to ladle out.

Turns out the best way to fight hunger in Bush 43's administration isn't to get food to the famished but to simply stop calling the foodless ``hungry.''

Every year, the Agriculture Department issues a report that measures Americans' access to food, and it has consistently used the word "hunger" to describe those who can least afford to put food on the table. But not this year.
Mark Nord, the lead author of the report, said "hungry" is "not a scientifically accurate term for the specific phenomenon being measured in the food security survey." Nord, a USDA sociologist, said, "We don't have a measure of that condition."
The USDA said that 12 percent of Americans -- 35 million people -- could not put food on the table at least part of last year. Eleven million of them reported going hungry at times. Beginning this year, the USDA has determined "very low food security" to be a more scientifically palatable description for that group. (Washington Post; 11-16)

Brilliant. (Aside from that whole ``more scientifically palatable" mumbo-jumbo -- which is starkly out of place with the rest of this administration's revelational M.O.)

If we stop acknowledging the problem itself, it will go away. How Zen!

American students falling behind their global peers? No Child Left Behind!

Gay-bashing? Defense of Marriage!

Atmospheric pollution? Shrinking woodlands? Clear Skies! Healthy Forests!

Obviously, there are those who don't get it. There are people, eggheads and nitpickers mostly, who insist on calling things as they grimly are instead of how they might be. This helps explain why we never saw Katrina for the blessing it was. It wasn't a horrible natural calamity -- it was simply an unanticipated water surplus. And who doesn't love water?!?!

Meet the new boss...

2006-11-15T16:34:00.000-05:00

Trent Lott returns to power (although, as anyone who watches the Senate closely knows, he never really left). Joe Lieberman says he can't rule out caucusing with the GOP in the future. And, lo and behold, the Democrats in the House have revived the circular firing squad before they even get those new drapes installed.

It's bad enough that incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is allowing a schoolgirl spat with Jane Harman to push her into tapping sleazebag Alcee Hastings (who was impeached as a federal judge in 1989) as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Now, she's breaking arms on behalf of John Murtha's bid to be majority leader, and newshounds and partisans are hot on the trail of his ethical foibles, from Ye Olde Abscam to his most recent gaffe just this week, in which he referred to the vaunted ethics reform package Pelosi campaigned on as "total crap." Delightful. Howie Kurtz wants to know why nobody cared about this before, but apparently he missed this terrific article from October, in which the NYT spells out just how loyal Murtha is to his ultimate overlord: power.

Now, nobody's going to mistake Steny Hoyer, Pelosi's current top lieutenant and Murtha's main rival for the leader post, for either a Pelosi loyalist or a squeaky-clean do-gooder. Last year, when Democrats unveiled their ethics reform package, Hoyer was raising money for a House candidate in Florida (a winner, for what it's worth). Like Murtha, Hoyer's a member of the powerful Appropriations Committee, and he has been an equally staunch opponent of doing away with the pork-barrel feeding frenzy known as earmarking. In addition, Hoyer has been the leading proponent of Democrats' efforts to mimic the GOP's "K Street Project," courting lobbyists and ensuring a steady flow of campaign cash. Hoyer has occasionally gone out of his way to undermine Pelosi, and that has caused some bad blood between them, although both constantly deny it.

That said, Hoyer's a smart guy, a steady politician, a voracious fundraiser and a steady shoulder for newbie candidates. He's also the bridge linking the San Francisco Liberal to the Blue Dog Democrats and the more moderate wing of the Democratic caucus (a group that got bigger last week, in many cases thanks at least in part to Hoyer's efforts). As DLC strategist Marshall Wittmann once said, "it takes two wings to fly," and purging Hoyer at this point might leave Pelosi's aircraft struggling just to get off the runway.

And in the end, Hoyer's ethics only give off a vague whiff of corruption. Murtha, however, is a well-known stinkbomb. It's pretty obvious that anyone looking for a scalp from the new Democratic majority won't have to go far to notch the first one if Murtha wins the leader job. If Pelosi wants to be more than a historical footnote, she would do well to re-read the chapter filed under "The Rise and Fall of the Republican Revolution."

Update: Hoyer won, by an embarrassingly large margin. Nicely done, Nancy. But don't be fooled by the analysis that Pelosi now has an adversary instead of an ally at her side. Hoyer has always been something of an adversary. What will be interesting now is how he uses the political capital he just collected.

Allen's Vault

2006-11-14T11:28:00.000-05:00

We've spent considerable time in recent days wringing all possible droplets of guilty joy from Sen. George Allen's troubled re-election campaign and comeuppance.

I'd like to indulge for at least one more post. There's still some schadenfreude to squeeze out.

Turns out Allen vaulted everything he ever wrote, for posterity's sake. He so fancied himself a man of history that he thought he'd do all future scholars a favor by preserving every scrap of his writing -- from official correspondence to bar napkins featuring just a chicken scratch. According to a former Allen staffer I spoke to this weekend, Allen's habit annoyed everyone in his office.

``He actually has a real vault, like they have in a bank,'' said the staffer, a Republican. (CHB is a redstate Democrat after all -- giving him an all-access pass to reasonable people on both sides of the aisle.) ``He's ridiculous.''

Where is this vault? When do we get a peek at Allen's greatness, or at least his favorite racist jokes? Sounds like a job for Geraldo Rivera.

Hasta la vista, Felix Macacawitz

2006-11-09T15:25:00.000-05:00

Well, that was characteristically unimpressive.

A couple of pieces of advice, Sen. Allen: First, you're never going to come out well in comparison when you stand up next to Sen. John Warner. It's just going to remind people what a real statesman looks like -- and remind them that it's not you. Second, PUT THE DARN FOOTBALL DOWN!!!! It's been a long time since anyone cared that your daddy was a football coach.

As I sit here and wallow in the waves of schadenfreude crashing over me, it's easy to see the major message of this campaign: Northern Virginia rules. Jim Webb walloped Allen in the NoVa districts, places where the state's growth is concentrated. Those counties and cities aren't getting any redder anytime soon -- especially since newly-elected Democrats will be bringing a whole new group of staffers with them, folks who are likely to choose to live in close-in places such as Arlington and Alexandria.

Mark Warner. Tim Kaine. And now, Jim Webb (by far the weakest of the three candidates, I might add). Warner, of course, won re-election in 2002 -- but he's not, and has never been, the kind of superconservative that Allen has always proudly proclaimed himself to be. Repeat after me: Virginia is NOT a ruby-red state.

Neither is Florida, Charlie Crist's resounding victory notwithstanding. Yes, Crist won, but he ran on a platform that's vastly more moderate than the positions espoused by the man he's replacing, Gov. Jeb Bush. Crist beat back a right-wing challenge in the primary despite refusing to dictate to women on the issue of abortion or declare homosexuality the immoral scourge of modern life. I'm not deluded enough to believe that "Chain Gang Charlie" will think terribly hard before signing death warrants, but he has said that he wants to end Florida's shameful practice of forcing ex-convicts to apply for clemency in order to reclaim their right to vote. With the right candidate (preferably one not related to the sitting governor), Florida could easily back a Democratic presidential candidate in 2008.

For now, though, let's say goodbye to Sen. Allen. Maybe now he'll have time to read all of Webb's novels.

Big Tentin'

2006-11-09T14:30:00.000-05:00

Jonah is right -- things will be interesting to watch and it all will unfold beneath a new tent pole.

Thanks to their chokehold on the federal government, and their near orthodox commitment to pay-to-play, all kinds of varied and seemingly antithetical forces have been treated to a federal bonanza in the last five-plus-years. Evangelicals, who may have risked turning their churches into IRS audit-eligible, tax-paying political organizations, were allied with the GOP's rollback of science.

The pharmaceutical and energy industries wrote legislation that padded their pockets with taxpayer loot. The xenophobes found themselves alongside multinational corporate interests. Racists, homophobes and anti-Semites marched in lockstep with Jewish former liberals who called themselves neoconservatives.

The Republicans have simply been the big tent -- and what a circus crowd it was beneath that thing. You don't have to take Rush Limbaugh's word for it to see that all kinds of folks carried political water for interests that had nothing to do with their own save for serving the GOP machine.

This coalition of the chilling was smashed on Tuesday. And now the Democratic tent will fill up -- with revenge-seekers and moderate move-along types. Free traders will be in the same ruling caucus as protectionists. Hawks, doves, liberals, conservatives. The netroots and the establishment will go at it. It will be a lot of fun to watch.

Let's just hope the Democrats show a bit of discipline while leading the first branch of American government. CHB isn't disciplined, however, so I'd say: Let's get right to withdrawal plans in Iraq; let's allow the government to negotiate with drug companies over prices instead of having to remain mute, as is currently the law; let's look at ceo pay and the minimum wage. Let's establish national election guidelines to ensure paper trails. And let's fix the alternative minimum tax after a long series of hearings held in congressional districts around the country -- a GOP playbook staple to drum up good press, look convincingly populist, and smother those bastards for their failure to make the tax code fair for those of us who work and play by the rules.

And let's sic the IRS on all them daggum politickin' churches.

This From the Guy Who Fretted Over Serbian Sovereignty

2006-11-09T12:55:00.000-05:00

Well, we may have gotten a new Congress without DeLay, but damn, things are going to be interesting to watch.

Yes Santa, There is a Virginia

2006-11-08T15:01:00.000-05:00

And now here we are, waiting for Virginia to deliver the Senate to the Democrats.

CHB had little hope that any Democrat besides the Nelsonator would win in Nebraska. It was expected, dreamboat included.

But Oh Virginia.

Even if you don't serve up a dose of karma to us all and elect Webb, it's been a terrific ride. Going in a racist bully with high presidential hopes for 2008, George Felix Allen emerged a Jew. True to form, he's a self-hater, because bullyhood doesn't shake easily (to wit: W's tempestuous presser today).

Sic Semper Tyrannis. That's Virginia's state motto.

Virginia, deliver us.

In the Immortal Words of Tenacious D...

2006-11-08T12:15:00.000-05:00

FUCK, YEAH!

With thanks to Jack Black .

Update: Pardon my French. I got a little excited there.

Mark Halperin Responds. Really.

2006-11-06T17:00:00.000-05:00

WELCOME TALKINGPOINTSMEMO.COM READERS! WE HOPE YOU'LL HAVE A LOOK AROUND http://cardcarryingmember.blogspot.com. AND IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING THAT spacegirl AND I ENDORSE YOUR STATE'S /DISTRICT'S DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE! (And: Thanks to Josh Marshall for the link!)

Atrios and Josh Marshall both have posts describing the apparent unwillingness of the national political media to cover the deliberately deceptive and harassing phone calls being made by GOP-funded groups. Probably the most ire-attracting target is Mark Halperin, ABC's political news director, who recently went on Hugh Hewitt's radio show and, to be polite about it, treated HH and the right the way a male prostitute treats Ted Haggard.

Curious to see if Josh and Duncan were right, I went to http://abcnews.com and did a quick search of their politics coverage to see what if anything I could find about the harassing and deceptive calls. Couldn't find anything.

So, I thought I'd call Mark Halperin's office to ask him about all this. I went to Google Maps, clicked "Find Businesses", and entered "20009" for the zip and "ABC News" for the business. Here's a shortcut to the resulting page.

So, I called (202) 222-7777 and asked for the office of Mark Halperin. I was transferred to his voicemail.

About 2 minutes later, he returned my call (perhaps because I have a DC-area cell number). It's kind of amusing in this day and age to answer your phone and hear "This is Mark Halperin".

So, I said something like this:

Hi Mr. Halperin, I'm an ABC viewer, and I'm concerned that you're not covering the Republicans' harassing phone-call strategy.

Halperin replied, very pleasantly if rushed, something like this:

No, we're covering it. It's all over ABC radio and TV---the largest political radio network. It's going to be all over the place.

Thinking that perhaps he was talking about they-all-do-it coverage of robocalls in general, rather than the GOP deceive-and-harass variety, I said something like

I'm talking about the ones where they call and deceive the person who picks up into...

He cut me off---though in a polite tone---and said

I know what you're talking about. That's what we're covering.

Puzzled, I said

Well, that's strange, because I didn't see anything about it on abcnews.com.

And he replied something to the effect of

It's not on the website yet, but it will be.

And I said something like

Well, thanks very much. I'm glad to hear you're covering it. I'll be looking for that coverage.

And he said

You're welcome sir, have a nice night.

So how about that.

If it turns out he was telling the truth, I'll be pleased to hear it and to credit him and ABC (if only for doing the job they *should* be doiong).

If not, I'll be posting communications information about how you can really screw up Mark Halperin's election eve and day.

Update: As of 5:16pm, http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/ is running a no-link banner that reads

BREAKING NEWS DEMOCRATS SEND CEASE-AND-DESIST LETTER TO REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE OVER AUTOMATED PHONE CALLS TO VOTERS.

Let's hope they really cover this issue.

Second Update: abcnews.com now has a story on the Dems' letter.

More on the GOP Dirty Tricks Campaign

2006-11-06T08:30:00.000-05:00

At least one commentator is suggesting that "what happened in New Hampshire is perfectly legal." Perhaps. As I wrote, I don't know the law here.

On the substance, though: One thing that drives me nuts about Dem responses to the various GOP outrages is that the Dems wind up sounding like a bunch of whiners -- confirming the weak-Democrats stereotype that the GOP finds so useful.

I wish that on-camera Dems would stop simply being outraged and start hitting back.

For example: why not put up an ad (and if it's too late for that, hold a press conference) in which Dem staffers announce the home and cell numbers of Ken Mehlman and other RNC and NRCC folks. Just as good, announce the home and cell numbers of the GOP candidates the NRCC is trying to help. Actually, don't stop there: announce the home and cell numbers of their families, too. And maybe their friends. That way, people receiving these early-morning, repeat robocalls can call the perps and their beneficiaries to complain. I bet the local and national media would cover that story.

They're All The Same

2006-11-05T23:02:00.000-05:00

Or are they?

Next time someone tells you that Dems and Republicans are comparably bad, don't point out the 2002 New Hampshire phone-jamming scandal.

Nah. That's old news.

Just ask them what the Dems have done in recent memory that compares to this garbage.

These people don't believe in democracy or representative government. The only thing they understand or believe in is power. I hope that people receiving these calls will file an FCC complaint for every harassing, fraudulent call they receive. I don't know the law here, but I wonder whether conspiring to use telephone lines to harass and deceive subscribers is not just a civil but also a criminal offense.

I also hope that local news stations --- the ones that Bush-Cheney like to use to try to duck the national media --- will inform their audiences that those calls they're getting between 5-6am are coming from GOP groups, for the purposes of deceiving them.

Enough already.

The robber baron strikes back

2006-10-05T15:46:00.000-04:00

You knew it was coming: A month after Los Angeles Times publisher Jeffrey M. Johnson told Tribune Co. CEO Dennis FitzSimons to take his job cuts and shove them, Trib executives have fired him. I'm sure resumes are being updated all over the newsrooms in L.A. and Washington: After all, what journalist in his or her right mind would stick around for the inevitable bloodletting? We know from other "restructurings" at the chain's other papers that what comes next will be bad for both morale and the daily product (for evidence, see the once-venerable Baltimore Sun fight its daily uphill battle). We also know that the end result won't make Tribune much more money than it currently sucks out of the Times and other papers. But FitzSimons, whose reverse Midas Touch may ultimately have the effect of bringing down the entire Trib empire, will press on. After all, Johnson's replacement (the current publisher of the Chicago Tribune) will presumably be far more amenable to slashing staff in an effort to cut costs.

The Times story says the paper's top editor, superstar Dean Baquet, hasn't decided whether he'll follow Johnson out the door. He should. While I imagine he feels some obligation to continue fighting the good fight, it's obvious that FitzSimons and his minions don't plan to let anything stand in their way.

Now, the Times is partially responsible for its own mess: The idiotic Chandler family, the founding owners of the paper, managed to royally screw up Tribune Co. by dragging its gigantic tax liability into the 2000 merger between Tribune and their own Times Mirror. Tribune, which was a profit-making machine before the merger, has never even gotten close to touching its pre-merger stock price since. The delightfully moronic Chandlers have also helped worsen the current crisis facing Tribune; their moaning and groaning about profits essentially forced FitzSimons to consider major changes to the company, which many anticipate will eventually include the sale of some of the underperforming newspapers.

This is not a surprising result from people who had already done everything they could to squander the newspaper's legacy before cashing in. Remember Mark Willes?

That said, the Times has managed to escape the brunt of the painful cuts that other Trib papers have suffered in recent years; when the company built a fancy new Washington bureau, the staffs of nearly all of the other papers, besides the Times and the Tribune, were noticeably smaller when they moved in. But Times staffers continued to complain -- loudly -- about their loss of autonomy and how horrible it was to have everyone in the same office. Former Tribune employees (some of whom wound up out of journalism altogether as a result of being laid off) were decidedly unsympathetic.

Hopefully, Johnson's departure means the official beginning of the end of the uneasy marriage between the Times and Tribune. The blockheads up in Tribune Tower were never able to come to terms with the fact that the Times was the company's flagship paper, and the L.A. folks never got used to being managed from outside California. The union has been a miserable failure from a business standpoint, and there is simply no case to be made that other Tribune newspapers are in any way the better for it.

But if Johnson's career is over, he should be followed -- quickly -- out the door by FitzSimons. If it's really all about money, then the company's financial performance during his tenure should spell his doom.

Update: Michael Kinsley offers an interesting and thoughtful take on the whole mess here.

Bigots

2006-10-03T09:57:00.000-04:00

Josh Marshall excerpted the following graf from today's WSJ Editorial (helpfully subtitled: "Could a gay Congressman be quarantined?"):

But in today's politically correct culture, it's easy to understand how senior Republicans might well have decided they had no grounds to doubt Mr. Foley merely because he was gay and a little too friendly in emails. Some of those liberals now shouting the loudest for Mr. Hastert's head are the same voices who tell us that the larger society must be tolerant of private lifestyle choices, and certainly must never leap to conclusions about gay men and young boys. Are these Democratic critics of Mr. Hastert saying that they now have more sympathy for the Boy Scouts' decision to ban gay scoutmasters? Where's Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on that one?

So there you have it. Gays=Bad. Boy Scouts=right to worry about whether gays are "clean" and "morally straight".

I knew that the WSJ ed board was nutty in its support for up-the-ladder redistributive fiscal policy and beat-them-down policies for military/CIA prisoners. But I hadn't realized they challenged Dobson, Perkins, et al in their bigotry.

For shame.

Update: By contrast, in its editorial calling for Hastert to resign as speaker the Wash Times somehow manages to avoid using either the word "homosexual" or "gay". (And as for the Wash Times, this is what brings them to call for Denny's head? The corruption, failure of oversight on the war and everything else, fracture of House rules, and all the rest -- none of that was enough, but this is? The Foley issue is bad, no doubt. But it pales by comparison to the rest of Denny's sins, be they of omission or commision.) This is one of those moments when it really feels like our nation's politics has simply jumped the shark. Calling Henry Winkler, we have a job for you.....

The passion of Mark Foley

2006-10-02T11:43:00.000-04:00

I can't manage to work up a full course of schadenfreude over the sordid situation that prompted Mark Foley to resign, largely because anyone who ran in Florida or DC political circles knew that, sooner or later, he was headed for an embarrassing series of revelations. What's shocking to nearly everyone, though, is the form it took. Everyone knew Foley was gay; unfortunately, he clearly thought that hiding that fact was necessary to protect his political viability. But staying in that closet also meant that he could never be more than a congressman: he dropped out of the race to replace Bob Graham in 2004 because it became very clear that he would be outed if he didn't.

Now, the tragic irony is that Foley has done far more damage to the GOP through his insane interactions with underage House pages than he ever could have by admitting he was gay. It's fairly unlikely that Foley -- who was popular in his district -- would have been voted out had he come out, and Jim Kolbe proved that it's possible to be gay and a Republican (he even managed to score a committee chairmanship).

There's no question that Foley is an idiot of epic proportions -- and, depending on your definition of pedophilia, may in fact have problems that are in no way related to his homosexuality (despite ongoing Republican efforts to link the two as part of their gay-bashing agenda). He was right to resign, and from the sound of it, he'll be amazingly lucky if he doesn't end up in jail for violating some of the very same laws he championed in Congress.

The much bigger problem here, though, is the actions of GOP leaders in House, who did their very best ostrich impersonation when confronted with Foley's unfortunate penchant for cozying up to pages. The bottom line is this: Parents across the country who send their children to Washington to become congressional pages do so believing that their kids will be safe, that the people elected to write our laws will protect them from harm. Denny Hastert, John Boehner, Tom DeLay, Roy Blunt, Tom Reynolds and John Shimkus failed these kids, and their parents. I'm sure that when GOP officials asked Foley about his contacts with pages, he huffed and puffed and insisted that it was all innocent, and I understand the urge to trust a colleague and defuse an unpleasant situation.

But the fact remains that these pages are very vulnerable when they walk the halls of the Capitol -- vulnerable because securing a spot as a page is considered a major deal, a super resume builder for kids anxious to get into a top college. By definition, these young men and women want to please the lawmakers they work for, because a recommendation letter from Congressman X or Senator Y is the ultimate score. If you're a page, and a congressman wants to keep in touch, you do it -- and you're likely to at least try and maintain whatever kind of relationship he wants, because not only do you need his support, pissing him off could lead to the unthinkable possibility that he'll do something that could block your upward career trajectory.

That's all the more reason why House GOP leaders should have done something: Not because it was politically expedient (although in hindsight, it probably was), but because it was the right thing to do, and the necessary thing. Suppose Hastert et al got word that a congressman was buying alcohol for a 15- or 16-year-old page -- or was even discussing the possibility via instant messaging. They would never have put up with that. What Foley did was exactly the same in one key way: What he was doing was against the law. The fact that publicly reprimanding Foley would have been extraordinarily embarrassing because of the sexual nature of his contacts with the pages is irrelevant, and it's deeply disturbing that anyone in the House would try and sweep this under the rug when children were involved.

Playing at the edge of the rules when it comes to lobbyists, campaign contributions and lawmaking is one thing. Pushing the envelope when it comes to living up to a promise made to young people and their parents is another, and Hastert and friends should be deeply ashamed.

It's also unfortunate that Reynolds, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, would even consider keeping Foley's tainted campaign cash, let alone vacuuming up what's left in Foley's considerable war chest to fund ads before next month's elections. I can't imagine that "values voters" will think much of that.

Update: According to Drudge, the young man with whom Foley had cybersex before a House vote (all together now....EWWWWW! And trust me, if you were among the people who had occasion to shake hands with these folks in the Speaker's Lobby while trolling for interviews, you'd be grossed out, too) was over 18 when it happened. While the chief point here is that ABC News looks completely ridiculous (since the initial report said he was under 18), it also adds to the general confusion over whether a criminal prosecution of Foley is even possible. I stick by the notion that, at least in theory, Foley was working hard to violate the very law he pushed so hard for, but I'll concede that the legal waters here are very muddy.

Guess Nethercutt Beat the Wrong Foley

2006-09-29T18:14:00.000-04:00

Sure seems like House Republicans picked the wrong guy to head up the House Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus (Note: those links were broken when I tried them, too.)

So let's tally it up:

Cunningham -- in jail for bribery.
Delay -- resigned after indictment (and bad-looking polls).
Ney -- hasn't resigned....has just plead guilty to bribery charges.
Foley -- resigned after revelations suggesting that he isn't the right guy to head up the House Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus.

I honestly don't remember -- did this many Dems bite the bullet (or jail bars, or whatever) when the House banking scandal + Rosty stuff went down?

Speaking of Derisive Humor....

2006-09-28T18:32:00.000-04:00

Check this one out.

A Few Good Men

2006-09-28T12:35:00.000-04:00

So House Speaker Denny Hastert thinks that terrorists would be "coddled" if the 160 Democrats who voted against the odious bill setting up "trials" for detainees got their way. Leaving aside the quite serious notion that the legislation, in fact, essentially guts the Constitution, one wonders what Hastert has to say about the seven members of his own party who bucked what had to have been unrelenting pressure and hit the "no" button on Wednesday: Roscoe Bartlett, Wayne Gilchrest, Walter Jones, Steven LaTourette, Jim Leach, Ron Paul and Jerry Moran.

With the exception of Gilchrest, the Civil Liberties Seven are nobody's liberals: Bartlett, for example, voted against the extension of the Voting Rights Act earlier this year, and Walter Jones' claim to fame was, until fairly recently, his absurd crusade to serve "Freedom Vanilla" frozen yogurt in the Capitol cafeterias in retaliation for France's refusal to join us in the invasion of Iraq. Even Gilchrest, who has a laudable record of opposing oil drilling in Alaska and the wholesale slashing of social welfare programs, usually sides with the GOP.

But this was apparently too much even for them. According to the Baltimore Sun, a spokeswoman for Bartlett -- who voted against the renewal of the Patriot Act on the grounds that it infringed on the privacy of Americans -- is worried about "unintended consequences" of the detainee bill. Gilchrest, a former Marine and a decorated Vietnam veteran, told the paper that the legislation "fogs the issue" of whether the U.S. would abide by the Geneva Conventions.

Too bad the Republican senators who won so much praise for their "brave" stance against the administration weren't able to muster that kind of courage.

More than offsetting the Republican defectors were the 34 Democrats who voted for the bill. Some of them -- including Senate candidates Harold Ford and Sherrod Brown -- are engaged in tough campaign battles this fall. But what excuse does, say, Florida's Allen Boyd have? He doesn't even have an opponent in November.

Of course, Boyd and his 33 brethren deserve credit for at least showing up for work on Wednesday. Twelve representatives skipped the vote, including Democrat Jim Davis of Florida, who's running for governor. Nothing says "vote for me" like missing the chance to weigh in on one of the most important issues Congress has tackled this year.

Update: The Senate, that bastion of sensibility and restraint, has just defeated Arlen Specter's amendment to restore habeas corpus rights to detainees. The vote was 49-51, with Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson the only Democrat who voted with the Republicans (as did, incidentally, John McCain, Lindsey Graham and John Warner, the spines that were so stiff only a week ago apparently transformed into jelly). Republican Sens. Sununu, Chafee, Smith and Specter voted for the amendment.

Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, to whom I often refer affectionately as "the girls from Maine," dented their own reputations as mavericks: Collins voted against Specter's amendment, and Snowe, for some reason, didn't vote.

Life of the Party

2006-09-26T16:20:00.000-04:00

spacegirl draws my attention to this brilliant ad by the DSCC, poking fun at Republican Michael Steele, who is the Republican candidate for the US Senate from Maryland. Republican Steele has gone out of his way to obscure his membership in the Republican party (see this post, for example). Meanwhile, Republican Steele has been running a commercial in which he highlights his love for puppies to fend off ads he forecasts will attack him for his Republican stands in favor of Republican positions.

Of course, as spacegirl likes to remind me, Republican Steele was chairman of the Republican Party of Maryland. He also likes to do fundraisers with Republican President Bush and Republican President Bush's Republican adviser Karl Rove.

It's nice to see the DSCC using humor and smiling derision to ridicule an opponent (one who richly deserves it, if only for pretending not to be whom he is) -- a tactic that Republicans use very effectively and Democrats rarely do.

Here's my suggestion for title of the next ad: "Republican Michael Steele: The Life of the Republican Party"

Happy New Year, Felix

2006-09-21T16:36:00.000-04:00

Well, it seems that Virginia Sen. George Allen won't be celebrating Rosh Hashana this weekend, despite his recent discovery that his mother's family was Jewish. The Washington Post actually interviewed Allen's mother for this piece, where she says that she kept her religion a secret because she was afraid her husband's family wouldn't stand for it:

Allen's mother said she first began concealing her Jewish roots after meeting her future husband, afraid that she would not be accepted by his parents and fearful that her religion could harm his budding coaching career, which started at Whittier College, a school in Southern California founded by Quakers.
"He didn't want me to tell his mother," she said of the elder George Allen. "At that time, that was a no-no, to marry outside the church." Allen died in 1990.

Now, Allen has defended himself during the "macaca" incident by repeatedly waxing rhapsodic about how in his house, the meritocracy of the football field reigned. And yet, his own parents kept his mother's Jewish heritage a secret out of fear of other people in the family. Maybe Allen Sr. really did blaze a new, more tolerant course in raising his own offspring, although young George's fascination with the Confederate flag would seem to run counter to that.

In reading this article, one thing struck me: Allen's Jewish grandfather, Felix Lumbroso, was imprisoned by the Nazis, a story that Allen often mentions on the campaign trail. Allen's own middle name is Felix, presumably after Lumbroso.

But unlike many other lawmakers -- who revel in using their full names, with middle initial and the occasional "Jr." in tow, Allen doesn't go by "George F. Allen." In fact, Allen insists that the "F." not be used, and will go so far as to have his staff call reporters and needle them about it. Admittedly, "Felix" is not the world's coolest name, and Allen hay have many reasons to leave it out of his political persona. But given the powerful nature of his grandfather's experience, one wonders why he wouldn't try to extend the old man's memory a place of honor.

What's depressing about the whole thing has nothing to do with politics, but rather with a family's reluctance to embrace a part of its history. Allen's mother obviously felt that being Jewish was something to hide. Is it any surprise, then, that her son feels the need to boast about her "great pork chops?"

The race card redux

2006-09-21T15:33:00.000-04:00

The Washington Post reports that black Republican groups are prodding ex-U.S. Rep. Kweisi Mfume, a former NAACP chief who recently lost a close Senate primary in Maryland to a white candidate, to cross party lines and endorse GOP nominee Michael Steele. It's worth a try, right? But the article also mentions a particularly noxious ad, apparently produced by the National Black Republican Association. The article quotes the ad thusly:

The ad identifies Martin Luther King Jr. as a Republican and pins the founding of the Ku Klux Klan on Democrats.
One woman says: "Democrats passed those black codes and Jim Crow laws. Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan."
"The Klan?" her friend replies. "White hoods and sheets?"
First woman: "Democrats fought all civil rights legislation from the 1860s to the 1960s. Democrats released those vicious dogs and fire hoses on blacks."
Second woman: "Seriously?"
The ad says that "Democrats want to keep us poor while voting ONLY Democrat" and, "Democrats have bamboozled blacks."

Now, no self-respecting Democrat can ignore the fact that there were many in the party (especially the loathsome Southern "Dixiecrats") who did, in fact, spend years fighting against the civil rights movement (exhibit A: Robert Byrd, who still has some ground to cover in his rehabilitation). At the same time, however, no self-respecting Republican can possibly ignore the fact that the most hard-core bigots were welcomed into the GOP's big tent when they found Democrats too liberal for their liking (exhibit A: the 2000 presidential primary in South Carolina).

Steele (whose campaign web site notes on its home page that hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons has endorsed him but fails to mention that, hey, look, he's a REPUBLICAN) deserves credit for demanding that the ad be withdrawn. But it's disturbing to see a particularly nasty strain of racial politics infecting the Maryland Senate race less than two weeks after primary day.

This race is fascinating on a number of levels in addition to the unprecedented setup of a white Democrat against a Black Republican: Steele's opponent, Rep. Ben Cardin, is the scion of a legendary Baltimore Jewish political family, while Steele's base is in the fast-growing part of the state that's closer to Washington. There are plenty of legitimate issues here (minimum wage, anyone? GM's last few workers in suburban Baltimore might be interested in that), and judging from the series of debacles during the primary, it's anyone's guess whether the election itself will be cleanly held.

What's not needed in Maryland are puntrooskie plays from Lee Atwater's old game plan.

Egads

2006-09-20T12:44:00.000-04:00

Speaking of choosing your principles, you pretty much have to read this.

Pick Your Principles to Suit Your Principal

2006-09-18T15:13:00.000-04:00

For more on John Yoo's absurdithon in yesterday's NYT, see this post by Orin Kerr over at Volokh for another embarrasing example of John Yoo's unfamiliarity with history (this time it's the history of things Yoo himself wrote). See also this follow-up post of Kerr's. It's disappointing but truly breathtaking just how much of a shill the quotes Kerr has unearted show Yoo to be.

In a nutshell:

Clinton use aggressive interpretation of executive authority in foreign policy...bad!
Bush tear up statutes, sign them while promising to disregard them....GOOD!

It must be great to be able to choose your principles to suit your principal.

Yoo Say Tomato, I Say Constitution

2006-09-17T11:10:00.000-04:00

Following on the heels of Ann Althouse's non-sequitur of a column on the Detroit NSA case (see this post by Glenn Greenwald for a debunking), today's NYT carries the amusingly named "How the Presidency Regained Its Balance. It will be entertaining to read the letters to the editor on this one (never mind the blogosphere) from the folks whose scholarship on con law and national security is a bit less, shall we way, creative than Yoo's.

I think my favorite part of Yoo's column is probably

the Hamdan decision was less a rebuke of the presidency than a sign of frustration with Congress's failure to update our laws to deal with the terrorist menace.

Where to even begin? By pointing out that the administration has repeatedly declined to even ask for Congress's advice on military tribunals, much less its permission or preferred rules? Maybe by pointing out, via Marty Lederman, that Hamdan was actually about the fact that

the Court held that Congress had, by statute, required that the commissions comply with the laws of war -- and held further that these commissions do not (for various reasons). [Emphasis added.]

It takes real chutzpah to say that when the Court rebukes a President for ignoring clear Congressional statute (i.e., obey Common Article 3), that rebuke is to Congress, and for being vague. It takes even more chutzpah to do so at a time when the President is calling senior senators (from his own party, which is largely beside the point) confused, and so on, because they won't agree to enact in statute essentially what he's been doing to violate existing statute.

The second contender for best bizarro-world line in Yoo's column is this one:

The judiciary...has shown far less deference to the executive in this war than in past conflicts.

That's a funny thing to say, since Hamdan is a reaffirmation of the category logic in Justice Jackson's concurring opinion in Youngstown, which of course was decided in 1952 (during the Korean conflict) and concerned President Truman's attempt to prevent strikes at steel factories due to his concerns over national security. So there we have it: the Court affirms reasoning from the Korean conflict -- Prez can't ignore duly enacted statutes regulating his conduct just because it's wartime -- and John Yoo sees a newly aggressive judiciary showing less deference today than in previous conflicts. Sigh.

One more contender for goofy line of the column:

The changes of the 1970's [regulating such things as by-fiat wiretapping of political opponents] occurred largely because we had no serious national security threats to United States soil, but plenty of paranoia in the wake of Richard Nixon's use of national security agencies to spy on political opponents.

Think about that one. "No serious national security threats to United States soil"....Does anyone else remember the Cold War? Either Yoo is forgetting about the Soviet Union and its various nuclear devices, or he is saying that these devices were never a serious threat. That doesn't fit so well with the Reagan-saved-us-by-standing-up-to-the-evil-empire stuff that seems so popular these days. Moreover, which is it? Was Nixon spying on political opponents (he was), or were these opponents paranoid for worrying that Nixon was spying on them? (I'll have to ask that member of my family who was wiretapped by the FBI for having the nerve to work on a congressional primary campaign in the early 1970s.) Generally speaking, I don't think it's paranoia when the feared event is actually true.

This column is really quite loopy -- a long exercise in counterfactual, historically false statements together with nearly or fully self-contradicting claims.

I really do wish that the NYT op-ed page would make a practice of either insisting on basic accuracy of factual claims or providing space for opposing, critical views when such a high-profile person publishes an op-ed on such an important topic. You know what's going to happen: lots of letters, a few short ones published, few people read them, and lots of folks who know little of the details of these issues but had the misfortune to read Yoo's column wind up totally misinformed. (Although, I have to say that the whole no-serious-threat may go a long way to making readers question Yoo's crediblity, as they should.)

One last thing: read these remarks, delivered at Yale law school's commencement this past May by Dan M. Kahan, Deputy Dean and Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law. John Yoo is the lawyer whom Kahan refers to as having tried

in cowardly fashion, to evade moral responsibility for their actions by insisting that law is nothing but a set of formally binding rules.

(At issue was his role in the now-infamous Torture Memo; note the hero of Kahan's story, who was himself no political liberal.)

LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA

2006-09-14T07:25:00.000-04:00

Picture a five-year-old with his eyes squinted shut and his fingers in his ears, yelling nonsense sounds at the top of his lungs in order to avoid having to see or listen to something he doesn't like.

In a nutshell, that's George W. Bush's interview with ~~Rich Lowry~~ columnists. See Brian Tamanaha's post over at Balkinization, which is where I saw the excerpt. [David Brooks also discusses this interview in today's NYT. Brooks also calls W "the most inner-directed man on the globe." Whatever.]

The lead quote, staggering in its LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-ness, is "Let me just first tell you that I’ve never been more convinced that the decisions I made are the right decisions." But one that possibly bears more comment in this political season is Bush's statement that

when I get home — and home is Texas — I’m going to look in the mirror and say, ‘The same set of principles that were etched in my heart when I told the people in 2000 what I believe are still there.’ That may be — tactics are different, you adjust, you make different decisions. But the principles are inviolate.

Never mind the no-new-nation-building stuff from 2000. Just ask yourself this: Self, didn't 9/11 change everything? If so, then how can this man claim that he follows exactly the same principles he had in 2000?

LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA.

That's how.

FINC

2006-09-11T13:42:00.000-04:00

Does anyone else out there see the irony of ABC's plan to break into tonight's broadcast of "Path to 9/11", its fictional account of the path to 9/11, to air a speech by the Fictionalizer in Chief?
I know they're planning to have some commentary afterward....maybe they can include Jayson Blair on the panel.

Give 'Em Back Their Dad

2006-09-07T17:39:00.000-04:00

For the record, I agree with Rick Santorum's kids: it's a lot more important that he focus on being their dad than on continuing to screw up our country.

I guess Santorum's campaign people decided that the softer approach was better than another frothy performance like he gave on MTP last weekend.

Update: I suppose this is as good a time as any to broadcast the lyrics of my Rick Santorum song (I'd hoped to spend Fall 2006 campaigning around PA, singing the song to anyone foolish enough to let me and my guitar up on stage, but life has intervened):

Rick Santorum
I deplore him
He's not a very tolerant guy

Pennsylvania
Stop the mania
He's mean enough to make babies cry

Rick Santorum
I abhor him
Rick Santorum
I deplore him

Rick Santorum
I deplore him
He's not a very tolerant guy

So in November
Please remember
To vote....for the other guy

Rick Santorum
I abhor him
Rick Santorum
I deplore him

(Repeat as music fades)

I am accepting additional verses, by the way.....

Earth to spacegirl

2006-09-01T13:45:00.000-04:00

Where are you? Where?

Where?

Armitage, BAMBY and Schoolyard Taunts

2006-09-01T13:03:00.000-04:00

Peter returns from his recent silence to write in a comment:

Still waiting for that post from Jonah discussing the bombshell that Armitage was the original leaker. But perhaps there's no time for eating a few portions of crow...

I've been wanting to post on this topic for days now but have been overwhelmed with the start of the new semester (Peter: you might notice that I haven't posted on anything since that story broke). Today being the day after I finished my teaching for the week, I can do so.

First, the revelation that Armitage was the first leaker certainly did surprise me (just as I'm sure it surprised essentially everyone else following the story -- although I look forward to Peter's sending me that old email in which he surmised that RA was the man). I had always wondered about Novak's "no partisan gunslinger" characterization, but I'd most recently assumed (I don't remember exactly what I thought a year+ ago) that that was a reference to someone like Marc Grossman (who may be a partisan gunslinger but isn't/wasn't known to me as one). It is worthwhile to note the reason that Armitage knew about Valerie Wilson's employ in the CIA: he read a memo that Marc Grossman put together.....at the request of the Office of the Vice President.

Second, I think Armitage is a coward, both for taking so long to confirm his role publicly and for refusing to do so himself.

Third, Armitage's role changes very little of my view about what I wrote in the post where Peter provides his latest comment. The only part that bears further comment is this:

Rove is every bit the scoundrel folks like me have been saying he is. He lied to the American people about his role in blowing Valerie Wilson's cover. Hell, he actually was willing to blow her cover (so much for the supposed national security focus of this administration).

Is it improper to refer to Rove's "role in blowing Valerie Wilson's cover"? Absolutely not. He was, indeed, willing to blow her cover: he confirmed her employment at the CIA to Novak (and then of course there was Matt Cooper and who knows who else). The fact that Rove was "only" a confirming source doesn't really matter on this point, particularly since Novak hadn't yet published the column (and it's worth noting that the CIA's press guy had refused to confirm the story and implored Novak not to print this info).

So to conclude, if Peter wants me to "eat[] a few portions of crow" because I didn't think Armitage was the leaker, then pass me a fork and a plate with a few portions of crow on it. He might then consider finding a way to do likewise when (a) he makes statements that are known to be false at the time he makes them and (b) someone points out that fact. See, for instance, the comments thread to this post, where Peter writes that "Wilson said that the Bush administration relied in part on his findings as a justification for war". As I note in my succeeding comment, that claim is simply false, something up to which Peter has yet to own.

Anyway, I guess I can always make fun of him because my portions of crow are bigger than his.

Glad we've moved this issue forward.

Update: Peter writes in the comments below that

I thought it was a central conceit ... that the Bush Administration was despicable in part because it actively sought to destroy the career of Wilson's wife as punishment for his writing the op-ed piece. And with Armitage being the original leaker, that theory is blown to smithereens (as no one, not even Jonah, will argue that Armitage is in the same camp as Rove et al).

I think that this is the one part of his comment(s) that I haven't really addressed before. Since this claim has been pushed by folks on the right beside Peter and allowed to get some traction by some reporters, editors and commentators, I want to provide a simple analogy to illustrate just how ridiculous an abuse of logic it is. So here goes:

Fact A: I go out drinking, as does Peter, though he goes out with some other people. We each drink a fifth of Bourbon.

Fact B: Peter drives home, drunk. He doesn't mean to drive drunk -- he's just too drunk to realize how drunk he is. He plows his car into a lightpole, somehow managing to drive away before the cops or any witnesses can place him at the scene.

Fact C: I drive home drunk, too. Not only do I realize I'm driving home drunk, I brag to all my friends about how drunk I am and what a great driver I am, even drunk. I even show some of my friends a briefing book I've prepared to illustrate what an effective drunk driver I am. Anyway, after Peter drives away but before anyone else happens by, I coincidentally plow my car into the same lightpole. This time, a cop drives by and arrests me for drunk driving.

Fact D: In the middle of my trial for drunk driving, in which trial the prosecutor makes a big point of establishing my gleeful intent to drive drunk, Peter allows it to be known through his lawyer (because journalists have found out and published the fact) that he was drunk and hit the lightpole before I did.

Fact E: My lawyer thunders to the jury that I must be innocent of drunk driving, since Peter was drunk and hit the pole. My lawyer goes on the O'Reilly Factor, Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News Sunday and denounces the prosecutor for charging me with hitting the lightpole, since now everyone knows that Peter hit the lightpole and he didn't even mean to hit it!

(As a side note, the NYT largely ignores the story for days and then prints a story citing criticism of the prosecutor by people who think I should be allowed an exception to drunk driving laws, on the grounds that my skill in driving drunk is really important to national security since it keeps in line critics who fear getting hit when I tear by them, Conrad Burns/Bill Janklow-style. The NYT article off-handedly quotes expert observers who suggest that it is likely that my trial will hinge on whether I drove drunk and hit a pole.)

Replace Peter's failure to realize how drunk he was with Armitage's casual discussion of sensitive information, my gleeful intent to drive drunk with Rove, Libby et al's (indisputed) intent to discredit Wilson together with their contacts with reporters, and Peter's argument with the stuff in Fact E, and you have the exact same logical argument: if one guy does something for reason X, no one else can do it for reason Y -- plus, since lots of people think reason X isn't that bad, reason Y can't be bad either.

It's really quite surprising to me that any serious person would seriously make this very unserious argument.

Update 2: Just to clarify: I do not mean to suggest that Scooter Libby is on trial for the "underlying offense" of blowing Valerie Wilson's cover. I used the trial part of my analogy above for dramatic effect, though I certainly didn't need to. In any case, Scooter Libby is on trial only for the reason that the GOP Congress impeached President Clinton. Just to be clear about how minor the charges are and all.

GOP Voter, Is Thy Name Petard?

2006-08-24T18:18:00.000-04:00

Paul Kiel at TPMmuckraker has an excellent post about what's going on in TX-22. Briefly, Tom DeLay has decided that he'd rather Kash in on K Street than Kontinue to represent his former Konstituents. DeLay Kwit the 2006 election race after winning his district's primary, evidently using the primary Kampaign to juice up his Koffers (which Kan then be used to help pay any legal expenses related to the state money-laundering charges Kurrently pending against him). DeLay then Klaimed that he had moved to northern Virginia, and thus the local GOP should be allowed to replace him on the ballot. Unfortunately for the Hammer, the Kourts nailed him by refusing to overturn or ignore Texas law, which Kwite Klearly disallows replacing a Kandidate under such Konditions.

All of that was decided several weeks ago, and since then there's been a lot of amusing news about RepubliKan disarray in Delay's old district (TPMmuckraker has reported a bunch of it). After various disputes among potential write-in Kandidates, the local party settled on its choice: Shelley Sekula-Gibbs.

Kiel's post today details the difficulty that Sekula-Gibbs will have, since voters who want to Kast their votes for her will have to spell out her name. That might be bad enough. As Kiel writes:

But it gets trickier. Voters in Texas' 22nd District will use the eSlate electronic voting machine. I decided to take it for a test drive and experience the thrill of democracy myself -- which you can do on Hart Intercivic's website.

Uh oh! But not to worry - we were assured by Josh Allen of Harter Intercivic that the actual machines have 25 characters, not a mere 18 as in the demo above. So her name will come in just under the limit.

The eSlate machine does lack a keyboard, however -- users roll a trackwheel to choose letters on a screen. And unfortunately for Dr. S-G, there's no hyphen.

Kiel has done a nice job of reporting: he contacted a lawyer in the Texas Secretary of State's office, who explained that

Judgments as to spelling will be made by "the counting judge," according to Amy Mitchell, an attorney with the Texas Secretary of State's office; such judgments tend to be lenient -- basically, if it "looks like" the name, it's counted as the name. Serious write-in candidates often lead to recounts, she said. Misspellings may well be the hanging chad of this election season.

Ms. Mitchell didn't know that the eSlate machine lacked a hyphen, but did say that “If you had most of the name without the hyphen, I don’t think the counting judge would discount the vote just because you didn’t have a hyphen that wasn’t on the program.”

Now, CCM's reader surely remembers all the RepubliKan foul-crying during the SCOTUS-stopped recount of the 2000 Florida presidential election---we need objective standards, can't rely on subjective attempts to "divine the voter's intent", etc. All of these Komplaints were a little odd given that

At the time of the election, Florida statutes stated that the standard for hand recounts was "the intent of the voter" -- no more detail than that, plain and simple.
The SCOTUS per curiam decision in the first Bush v. Gore case made it quite clear that the Florida Supreme Court had to follow the text of Florida statutes exactly, since otherwise the Florida Supreme Court would in effect obviate Florida's ability to take advantage of a certain safe-harbor provision in federal law concerning the counting of electoral votes. The details are complicated, but it's quite clear that the Florida SC decision to provide no real detail about counting standards was due to the SCOTUS's initial unanimous slap.

Now, the basis of the equal protection part of the second Bush v. Gore decision---the one that elected George W. Bush president, 5-4---was essentially that different people in a state can't have their votes' validity evaluated using different standards.

Let's leave aside the fact that the SCOTUS decision constituted a Catch 22---can't change the law, can't follow it, and let's also leave aside the fact that no federal election in history conceivably can have been constitutional under this standard. Instead, we'll just point out that relying on counting judges to discern whether a voter's stated choice "looks like" the name "Shelley Sekula-Gibbs" entails subjectivity and, potentially---likely?---different standards for different ballots.

I can't help thinking that if Ms. Sekula-Gibbs were a Democrat, the RepubliKan solution to this problem would be something like "You Kan't Kount any ballots for her if they don't have her name spelled exactly Korrectly!" I can even imagine a well-dressed bunch of Kongressional staffers starting a riot over attempts to count the ballots.

One can't help but think RepubliKans will advocate much greater leniency this time around.

And I hope that Democrats don't make a point of challenging ballots that reasonably look like attempts to vote for Ms. Sekula-Gibbs. RepubliKan hypocrisy, dishonesty and vote-suppression efforts are infuriating and deserve nothing but scorn. But the proper response on this issue is to set a good example, not to sKrew voters facing a less than simple situation. Since 2000, Democrats have understandably argued for more protections and options for voters (see Senate, New Jersey, 2002, for example). I hope they will avoid the tantalizing opportunity to sully that record just to get back at the RepubliKans---in Tom DeLay's district, no less---this year.

Digg It!

Join that Hezbollah dating service now!

2006-08-24T13:56:00.000-04:00

Michael Noer of Forbes has apparently unleashed quite a feminist shitstorm in the blogosphere with his aren't-I-clever Web article on what social researchers have discovered about what being a "career woman" does to a dude's chances of a happy marriage. Noer makes his case here:

To be clear, we're not talking about a high-school dropout minding a cash register. For our purposes, a "career girl" has a university-level (or higher) education, works more than 35 hours a week outside the home and makes more than $30,000 a year.

If a host of studies are to be believed, marrying these women is asking for trouble. If they quit their jobs and stay home with the kids, they will be unhappy (Journal of Marriage and Family, 2003). They will be unhappy if they make more money than you do (Social Forces, 2006). You will be unhappy if they make more money than you do (Journal of Marriage and Family, 2001). You will be more likely to fall ill (American Journal of Sociology). Even your house will be dirtier (Institute for Social Research).

He goes on to talk about why researchers (particularly economists) think this is so: Because when both household adults work, the "non-market labor" -- traditionally done by stay-at-home women -- simply doesn't get done. Somebody has to keep the toilets clean, this thinking goes, and when women go to work, they stop cleaning toilets (or keep cleaning them, on top of their 10-hour days in the office). Presto: Instant grounds for cranky women, and, by extension, unhappy men.

In response to Noer's article, Slate's Jack Shafer points out here that most of the research being cited is, in fact, applicable to both men and women who meet the affluent, career-oriented criteria. Shafer (whose column is always interesting, if frequently needlessly provocative) makes the case that the article, leaving out the headline and a few minor points, isn't actually insulting to women -- its crime, he says, is in shamelessly using the don't-marry-a-career-girl premise as a way to hook readers, a la the infamous Newsweek story that told women they were more likely to be killed by a terrorist than get married after age 40. Shafer invites women to "bore me with your fury" and tell him what we find irritating about the piece.

Well, Jack, here goes.

Noer's premise is insulting to all women because it implies that those toilets can (and should) be cleaned only by women -- and that, if a two-career couple is having trouble keeping up with all of those little chores and errands of everyday life, it's the woman's job to figure out how to restore the happiness equilibrium by either applying a little more elbow grease or cutting back on her hours. As Shafer points out, the research Noer cites doesn't support his bias towards blaming women. But he continues to do it. Instead of examining reasons why an increase in a woman's work hours might increase the peril to her marriage much more than an uptick in her husband's (and I can think of several anecdotal possibilities right off the top of my head), Noer simply advises men not to marry that ambitious MBA, no matter how interesting she might be now.

Whether Noer's motive was to intentionally mislead or simply to grab readers with a startling premise is irrelevant. Stories such as this one wind up in the lexicon of the culture-gender-class wars, trotted out every time some commentator suggests women should liven up their marriages by taking a pole-dancing aerobics class.

Better advice for Ms. MBA, in fact, might be to avoid getting involved with a man who thinks that mops are best used for Halloween costumes -- or, if she's going to make more money than her husband, to put that extra cash toward a good cleaning crew. Cancelling that Forbes subscription might also be in order.

Bush: To Hell With the Facts on the Ground

2006-08-22T07:52:00.000-04:00

At his press conference yesterday, President Bush heard the following question:

I'd like to go back to Iraq. You've continually cited the elections, the new government, its progress in Iraq, and yet the violence has gotten worse in certain areas. You've had to go to Baghdad again. Is it not time for a new strategy? Is it not time for a new strategy? And if not, why not?

Here's his answer (well, part of it -- he rambled in John Kerry fashion for quite a while):

THE PRESIDENT: The strategy is to help the Iraqi people achieve their objectives and their dreams, which is a democratic society. That's the strategy. The tactics -- now, either you say, yes, its important we stay there and get it done, or we leave. We're not leaving, so long as I'm the President. [Emphasis added.]

This is a remarkable statement, and one that Democrats and the President's two other vocal critics in Washington (George Will and Chuck Hagel) should make a point of hanging around his neck, for three reasons.

First, the President said, point blank, that no matter what happens, we're staying in Iraq. Come civil war, come peace, come what may -- we are staying in Iraq. For all his talk about how he makes decisions based on the facts and the commanders on the ground, he finally told the truth yesterday: it doesn't matter what happens, We're not leaving, so long as I'm the President.

Second, the President and his lieutenants have repeatedly stated things like "We'll stand down when the Iraqi security forces are ready to stand up." Well, he just said that we aren't going to be standing down, so long as I'm the President. Elementary logic (the contrapositive form, I believe) tells you that either the stand-down policy no longer has effect or the President does not think that Iraqi security forces will be ready to stand up before January 20, 2009 (for what it's worth, all of World War II lasted only slightly longer than the period between Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq and January 20, 2009). Six years, and still, not enough standing up for us to leave. And this is the President's "forward strategy of freedom". [Update: An additional part of this point involves incentives. The President and his supporters have criticized proposals to set a date for leaving Iraq on the grounds that it would give insurgents the incentive to simply wait us out. Well, swearing that We're not leaving, so long as I'm the President entails its own incentive problem: it tells both the government and the various factions in Iraq that they don't need to get serious about dealing with their security problems themselves, since they can count on our military to address them. Unless, of course, our military's presence is making things worse by stoking the insurgency -- in which case we should leave for that reason alone.]

Third, the President's statement makes clear that his plan for dealing with the unmitigated mess he and his faithful deputies have caused is, quite literally, more of the same: We're not leaving, so long as I'm the President. The problem with this "plan", of course, is that We're not leaving, so long as I'm the President is not actually a plan. Rather it is the result of a plan -- or would be, anyway, if the President had one.

As Joe Lieberman has pointed out, he will be President for years more. It's a corollary that the Democrats fail to criticize the President for his planlessness at their peril. They should focus like a laser beam on yesterday's rare honest statement of policy. If I were running the DNC's advertising this year, I'd have ads up all in competitive areas over the country, showing Bush say We're not leaving, so long as I'm the President, over and over, the way Pat Buchanan did with the first Bush's no-new-taxes pap in New Hampshire back in 1992. Make sure people know just how lost the man is. Make sure they know what his Republican supporters in Congress are actually supporting.

Digg It!

Lieberman: Against Rumsfeld Before He Was For Him Before He Was Against Him

2006-08-21T08:37:00.000-04:00

Joe Lieberman was on Face The Nation yesterday and did a relatively extended interview with Bob Schieffer and Jim Vandehei of the WaPo. He uttered a number of nonsequiturs and, in my view, unreasonable claims.

While I don't have time to annotate the full transcript, I was struck by his answer to Schieffer's final question:

SCHIEFFER: Tell us what you would do right now that is different than what the president is proposing.

Sen. LIEBERMAN: Yeah. I think there's--three years ago in October on this show you asked me and I said that I believe that it was time for new leadership at the Pentagon. I think it's still time for new leadership at the Pentagon. With all respect to Don Rumsfeld, who has done a grueling job for six years, we would benefit from new leadership to work with our military in Iraq.

Interesting. Lieberman says he called for "new leadership at the Pentagon" in October 2003, and then he mentions Rumsfeld's name.

Interesting to note, then, that back on May 14, 2004 -- several months after Ol' Joe's claimed October 2003 criticism of Rummy on FTN -- that our man Joe wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that "Secretary Rumsfeld's removal would delight foreign and domestic opponents of America's presence in Iraq" (this op-ed was written at the height of the Abu Ghraib-generated pressure on Rumsfeld to resign -- but you know, it doesn't make sense to change horses midstream, even when the one you're on has a bad habit of getting swept away with the current).

And now he's back, flip-flopping again. Got to get rid of Rummy.

Against him. For him. Against him again.

Well, hey, it's not like he's John Kerry or something -- give the guy some latitude to make some flip-flops in his policy positions. Next thing you know those nutty liberals will criticize Lieberman for highlighting his disagreements with President Bush, just because he said

It's time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be the commander in chief for three more critical years and that in matters of war we undermine presidential credibility at our nation's peril

Come to think of it, maybe that was just some generous across-the-party-lines advice.

Greg Mankiw : Krugman's a Flip-Flopper! [sound of glass wall breaking]

2006-08-18T11:48:00.000-04:00

I'm putting together some materials for general interest audience for a class on social insurance I'm teaching this fall. I've had an easy time finding stuff written by economists more inclined toward the government-can-help/inequality-is-rising-and-that's-a-problem views. Because I want to add some materials from the other side of the political spectrum, I went to Greg Mankiw's blog.

As I scrolled through some recent posts, I came up with
this one from about a month ago. In it, Mankiw criticizes Paul Krugman for

Allegedly being wrong in Krugman's claim that
"There's a persistent myth, perpetuated by economists who should know better -- like Edward Lazear, the chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers -- that rising inequality in the United States is mainly a matter of a rising gap between those with a lot of education and those without."
Supposedly writing the opposite in his textbook ... copyright 2005, no less!

Well, I couldn't help myself. Here's the text of my comment (number 61, I believe):

Jonah B. Gelbach said...; Professor Mankiw

You criticize Paul Krugman for writing in the NYT that returns to skill are not the most important source of rising inequality, given his apparently contradictory statement in his 2005 textbook:

I suppose that Paul has changed his mind since this book (copyright 2005) was written. It is a bit harsh, however, for Paul to be so hard on Eddie for believing what Paul believed not very long ago.

This criticism shows an considerable chutzpah.

I used the first edition of your textbook to teach my principles class and well remember your reference to the Arthur Laffer/George W. Bush/GOP Congressional leadership types (you know, the ones who claim that tax cuts pay for themselves) as "Charlatans and Cranks".

Anyone who has followed this story knows that you removed this reference in later editions (can't remember if it was in the 2nd or not, but it sure wasn't in the third!). Interesting to note that shortly thereafter you became head of the Bush CEA.

So please, spare us the lectures about consistency---glass houses and stones, they don't go together so well.

On the merits, there really isn't any contradiction between the Lemieux paper you cite and the point Krugman makes in the NYT. There are (at least) two reasons for this fact. First, as you should know, Professor Mankiw, the CPS has top-coded data. Thus top earnings values (from which wages have to be recovered for salary workers) have to be adjusted somehow. Lemieux addresses this problem, as is typical in this literature, by multiplying topcoded values by 1.4. That method is not very likely to help you characterize right-tail concentrations.

The second problem is probably worse: as you no doubt also know, the CPS is only a sample, with roughly 50,000-60,000 households in a given month (even using the ORG samples gets you only 3 times that sample size). One can hardly hope to get a sense of what's going in, say, the top 1% of the overall income distribution of 100+ million households from such a sample---there just aren't going to be enough observations *there*, even if they weren't top-coded. [See JG Update below]

None of this is to criticize Lemieux's paper -- it just doesn't address the rising inequality point to which Krugman's NYT statement refers (if memory serves, anyway).

Krugman's point is that income inequality is largely being driven by the extreme right tail of the income distribution, not by the increase in returns to a few more years of education.

Thus it is not impossible for returns to skill to explain a substantial amount of the increase in wage inequality in a dataset like the CPS even as ever greater concentration of income and wealth at the very top totally swamps this effect, which I believe that this is Krugman's NYT point, tho it's been a while since I read it or his textbook.

On the concentration point, go look at Figure B of Piketty and Saez's THE EVOLUTION OF TOP INCOMES: A HISTORICAL AND INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE (http://papers.nber.org/papers/w11955.pdf), and you will see that as an accounting matter, the growth in the top decile's share of income since about 1987 has been driven largely by a striking increase in the income of the top 1%. It's difficult to think of a story that (a) can explain this trend and (b) involves simple solutions like "get a BA" for low-to-moderate-income folks.

Jonah Gelbach
JG UPDATE: On reflection, I think this second point may not be so important, though its importance depends on the question being asked. 500 observations is often enough to estimate a mean with some precision, so if the data weren't top-coded it would probably be possible to estimate avg income in the top 1% reasonably well. On the other hand, the estimation of the top 1% cutoff point itself might still be challenging: it's known that the variance of the qth quantile of a distribution is q*(1-q)/(nf²), where n is the sample size and f is the density of the distribution at the qth quantile. in this case, f is likely very small, so one over its square is likely very big. Thus the precision of estimating the top 1% cutoff point from the CPS may well be quite low. Moreover, the earnings/income distribution above the top 1% cutoff is extremely right-skewed and has enormous variance. Thus it may be that very large sample sizes (i.e., much larger than usual Central Limit Theorem arguments suggest) would be needed to measure what's going on at the very top with any precision; this point is even more relevant when interest involves estimating trends from repeated independent cross-sections, in which case the variances essentially need to be summed across years. So my second point above might or might not be practically relevant if there were no topcoding (which there is, in any case).

Digg It!

Judge StrikesDown NSA Warrantless Surveillance

2006-08-17T14:14:00.000-04:00

In case you haven't heard, Federal District Court Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of Detroit (which lies in the Sixth Circuit) found the Bush Administration's use of warrantless surveillance by the NSA to be unconstitutional as well as a violation of the President's statutory authority under the FISA law. Judge Taylor has permanently enjoined the use of the NSA program.

This decision (available here; HT: ThinkProgress) is both potentially momentous and certain to be appealed, all the way to the Supreme Court, by the government and possibly also the plaintiffs (as to a part of the decision that found the government's alleged data mining activities nonjusticiable under the state secrets privilege).

I'm no lawyer, but I'm reading the decision with great interest, while also checking
law blogs for reaction by various experts. (One moderately lengthy reaction, which I haven't yet had time to read in any detail, is by Yale law prof
Jack Balkin.)

Without having finsihed the opinion, I'm a bit surprised that Judge Taylor found the program unconstitutional---reading various posts at law blogs has given me the clear sense that Fourth Amendment criticisms of the NSA program are pretty tenuous; this is the first time I can remember hearing anyone seriously raise the First Amendment, as Judge Taylor does in her opinion. By contrast, the program's essentially self-evident violation of FISA makes Judge Taylor's partial reliance on FISA seem obvious here. A bunch of people have written about the likely effect of the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision (which affirmed the logic of Justice Jackson's concurrence in the 1952 Youngstown case, a concurrence that as I understand it essentially says the President has no genearl authority to violate duly enacted statutes in national security matters) -- see Balkin's blog Balkinization for examples.

The most notable thing I've read so far is Judge Taylor's enumeration of various ways -- in public statements, press releases, the DOJ's publicly released white paper, and both classified and unclassified filings in the case in front of Judge Taylor -- in which the government has sought to defend the legality of the NSA program, followed by her conclusive statement that

the court finds Defendants' argument that they cannot defend this case without the use of classified information to be disingenuous and without merit.

Ouch. More to come.

Update: Jack Balkin's view of the decision is not very positive:

It is quite clear that the government will appeal this opinion, and because the court's opinion, quite frankly, has so many holes in it, it is also clear to me that the plaintiffs will have to relitigate the entire matter before the circuit court, and possibly the Supreme Court. The reasons that the court below has given are just not good enough. This is just the opening shot in what promises to be a long battle.

Balkin's post shows considerable skepticism about Judge Taylor's 4th amendment reasoning but credits (a bit) her 1st amendment argument (referring to it at one point as novel while also pointing out that a secret program like the NSA's by hypothesis could not involve the requisite chilling effect to violate the 1st).

He also expresses considerable disappointment in Judge Taylor's apparent failure to cite Hamdan or address the strongest interpretation of the government's arguments regarding the AUMF. Balkin's point is not that the government is right -- he's been quite clear over these last months about why it is wrong -- but rather that today's decision does a poor job of explaining why the government is, in fact, wrong.

Macaca-gate: the short-in-front and long-in-back of it

2006-08-16T17:15:00.000-04:00

From the hotlineblog, regarding the ongoing dust-up involving a Virginia-born man with a video camera and Senator George Allen (R-CSA):

According to two Republicans who heard the word used, "macaca" was a mash-up of "Mohawk," referring to Sidarth's distinctive hair, and "caca," Spanish slang for excrement, or "shit."

Said one Republican close to the campaign: "In other words, he was a shit-head, an annoyance." Allen, according to Republicans, heard members of his traveling entourage and Virginia Republicans use the phrase and picked it up. It was the first word that came to his mind when he spied Sidarth at the weekend's event, according to Republicans who have been briefed on Allen's version of the event.
Opponents of Allen have said that Sidarth's hair was clearly styled as a mullet rather than as a Mohawk.

You know when the word mullet can be deployed against your guy with even a modicum of efficacy, your candidate is in deep caca. Maybe the Allen campaign should follow W's lead and just refuse to admit people to his campaign events unless they've been vetted.

"Good judgment is an essential part of good governance"

2006-08-16T11:09:00.000-04:00

That's a phrase from Ned Lamont's op-ed in today's WSJ.

Folks impressed by Joe Lieberman's supposed reasonableness and afraid of Ned Lamont's supposed extremism, radicalism, or whatever else Ol' Joe and the RNC are saying, should go read that op-ed. You might be surprised by the basic pragmatism of the message.

(HT: TPM)

"They Don't Need Stata....They Have Word"

2006-08-15T14:41:00.000-04:00

(See below for title explanation.)

Doug Besharov is Joseph J. and Violet Jacobs Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also nominally a colleague of mine at the University of Maryland (Doug has an appointment in the Public Policy School at UMd; see below for a related full disclosure moment) It's probably fair to say that he is the go-to guy for the MSM on welfare policy questions. This topic happens to be one on which I've done some academic research over the last few years.

Today Doug has an op-ed column in the NYT, titled End Welfare Lite as We Know It. While I don't usually blog about my research, I think it's probably worth making some comments here, because Doug does his usually brilliant job of

citing basic statistics and characterizing largely uncontested facts, and then
drawing the same old "cut-benefits, ratchet-up-the-pressure-on-the-poor" conclusion, regardless of the relationship - positive, negative, or zero - between the facts and the conclusion.

In today's article, Doug acknowledges that "it took more than welfare reform to end welfare as we knew it", with the remarkable boom of the late-1990s being the obvious candidate. This acknowledgment is welcome. On the other hand, his claim that the decrease in caseloads came amid "little sign of serious additional hardship" likely is the result of a focus on summary statistics (which cannot tell us what applied microeconomists call the "counterfactual", that is, what would have happened in the absence of either reform or the economy) as well as studies that focus on average treatment effects.

As one of my papers (coauthored with Marianne Bitler and Hilary Hoynes, who have nothing to do with this blog in general or this post in particular) shows, however, average effects can miss a lot. Basic economic theory suggests that reforms like those that preceded and were cemented by the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) should increase earnings for some, reduce them for others, and have generally mixed or ambiguous effects on income. Our paper shows that average effects do a woeful job of characterizing the effects of reform. We do find some evidence of "additional hardship", and (for technical reasons) it is possible that the apparent additional hardship we do find is the tip of the iceberg. [Update: our paper involves only data from Connecticut's evaluation of its pre-PRWORA Jobs First program. Like other evaluations, this one involved random assignment of subjects to the new and old programs, which is an attractive feature for evaluating reform's effects (though such studies do have drawbacks). We chose this program because its features are both similar to those mandated by PRWORA and among the most substantial in terms of their difference from the pre-reform features. There is every reason (inlcuding preliminary analysis) to believe that results from other states' experiments would be similar. Since Jobs First is very similar to PRWORA, moreover, our results likely are generalizable to other states.]

None of this is to deny that income and earnings have gone up for some (perhaps even a lot) of women affected by welfare reform; in fact, our results show that these indicators must have improved for some women, and if the tip-of-the-iceberg effect mentioned above is real, then the gains for the winners would necessarily be even greater than is apparent in our paper. Doug writes that

the best estimates are that only about 40 percent to 50 percent of mothers who left welfare have steady, full-time jobs. Another 15 percent or so work part time. According to surveys in various states, these mothers are earning about $8 an hour. That’s about $16,000 a year for full-time employment. [JG note: I assume that these figures are averages, in which case they likely mask considerable heterogeneity of the same sort that motivated my paper, discussed above.]

Doug adds compassionately that

It is their story that the supporters of welfare reform celebrate, but $16,000 is not a lot of money, especially for a mother with two children.

That point is certainly true, but the fact is that no one in the welfare research world seriously thinks that these folks are going to do much better than $16,000 a year on average. The fact is that most women who have lengthy spells of welfare participation do not have the kind of skills that will translate into earnings much greater than this level (there's a reason they wind up on welfare in the first place). Barring a massive improvement in their human capital or a radical shift in the U.S. economy back toward career ladders based largely on experience, earnings just aren't going to be very high for these women.

Moreover, those folks - the ones who can get it together to find and hold a full-time job, if they are forced to - have never been the primary reason to worry about the stick-first, carrot-second style of reforms so dear to Doug and his comrades in arms. Rather, for me the biggest concern has always been the folks at the very bottom: those who will have very little chance of finding and keeping any job, even one that pays less than $8 (and almost surely has no benefits to speak of). Some critics of PRWORA suggested it would simply shift women from traditional cash assistance to other programs, with the disability and supplemental security insurance programs commonly mentioned.

Back when PRWORA was being debated in Congress and within the White House (a whole other but not uninteresting political story), PRWORA's supporters pooh-poohed these concerns. They pointed out that Medicaid would still be available, that states could exempt 20% of their welfare caseloads from work requirements and the 60-month lifetime limit on federal aid, and that states could supplement federal payments with their own dollars if they chose to. Thus, the claim was that the worst off folks would still have a safety net - we were just going to get serious with all those other folks who could make $16K per year working full-time.

In fact, there are some folks struggling to get off welfare even now. Doug writes today that

about a quarter of those who leave welfare return to the program, with many cycling in and out as they face temporary ups and downs.

In addition, when they’re off welfare, some of these families survive only because they still receive government assistance through food stamps (an average of more than $2,500), the Women, Infants and Children program (about $1,800 for infants and new mothers), Supplemental Security Income (an average of over $6,500), or housing aid (an average of $6,000). Their children also qualify for Medicaid. In reality, these families are still on welfare because they are still receiving benefits and not working -- call it "welfare lite."

So, yes, welfare reform reduced welfare dependency, but not as much as suggested by the political rhetoric, and a great deal of dependency is now diffused and hidden within larger social welfare programs.

Note that this set of results is precisely how PRWORA's proponents had suggested things should work: those who can't make it in the labor market would be exempted from new requirements and limits of the welfare system, allowing them to stay on (or perhaps cycle on and off) welfare as necessary, while their needs would be met using other government programs.

So what is Doug's response to this situation? You might think he would declare victory and say, "See, liberals? PRWORA's enactment hasn't left any women or children behind!". But Doug is no optimist about PRWORA when it comes to this particular topic. No. Apparently the appropriate response to full-time workers making an average of $16k per year and a bunch of folks who are at least partly insulated from the trilogy of their own bad luck, lack of skills and the welfare reforms of the 1990s is not the celebration so commonly entertained by PRWORA's cheerleaders.

Instead, Doug concludes (cue screeching eagle and rousing, Colbert Report-like music) thusly:

The tougher work and participation requirements added in this year’s reauthorization of the law could help states address the deeper needs of welfare families. But many states are already planning to avoid these new strictures with various administrative gimmicks, like placing the most troubled and disorganized families in state-financed programs where federal rules do not apply. This would only further obscure the high levels of continuing dependency.

For now, welfare reform deserves only two cheers. Not bad for a historic change in policy, but not good enough for us to be even close to satisfied.

Evidently we have met the enemy, and it's name is any provision of PRWORA -- or fiscal federalism, for that matter: how dare those states act like laboratories of democracy! -- that provides even the barest insulation for the would-be welfare population.

Let's review Doug's argument:

For all the talk about welfare reform's successes, lots of people are still in bad shape -- cycling in and out of welfare and other programs, making little money (say, because they work full-time for just $8 an hour). Some of them are even being protected by those lousy states!
Therefore we should crack down, increasing work requirements, eliminating exemptions, and (I guess) further restricting state flexibility.

Only someone committed to the "first know answer, then plug in possibly related but if necessary unrelated assertions of fact to justify answer" style of argument could come up with this combination. Regarding women who make $8/hour working full-time, it is just silly to say that increasing work requirements will somehow make them better off. Regarding women who continue to cycle through TANF or use other programs, I've said enough above.

This is the sort of article that reminds me why I unsubscribed from Doug's op-ed listserv (to which I'd never asked to be subscribed, incidentally).

Title explanation: Stata is a statistical software package that empirical researchers use (among other things) to assess the relationships between behavior and policies. Word is a wordprocessing package that (among other people) pundits use to claim things that suit their preferred policy outcomes. The title of this post is a comment made to me today by an economist friend who is no liberal and no stranger to Doug's writing after he read Doug's column from today's NYT.

Full disclosure moment--I provide this discussion to be clear that Doug is not my favorite guy for those of my two readers who may think I have an axe - as opposed to Doug's current shoddy argument - to grind: A few years ago (2002 if I remember correctly), one of my other papers---a revised version of which was recently published; see this link for an abstract---was the subject of a debate on the Tavis Smiley Show on NPR. One of my coauthors spent a few minutes discussing the earlier version of the paper with Tavis Smiley, after which there was a debate between Doug and some (non-economist, if I remember) person I'd never heard of and whose name I don't remember. The full story is a very long one, but the day before the show I spent a considerable amount of time on the phone with Doug and one of his AEI/UMd (both) associates answering questions they had about our paper. I did a nontrivial amount of additional statistical research to address concerns Doug expressed about our paper, the upshot of which was that they showed his concerns were almost certainly unfounded. None of this stopped Doug from going on the air and distorting my research, claiming we hadn't looked at things we had, and insinuating that the data we used were somehow inferior to his preferred source of analysis (which, as it happens, had been done on precisely the same dataset).

This stunt was pretty low in my book, not least because Doug was nominally a senior colleague of mine at Maryland (though the policy school and econ department are administratively separate). In his final email to me on this matter, Doug later claimed that the issue was my supposed "insistence that" my research "*must* be correct". The research itself has both strengths and weaknesses, as does all social science research; I'd have been delighted to acknowledge that point - indeed, I was willing to spend my own time investigating Doug's concerns precisely out of a commitment to healthy skepticism (if Doug were more committed to empirical research and less committed to the ensuing politics surrounding given empirical findings, he might have realized that fact). What made this interaction different was that Doug's particular criticisms were empirically unfounded, a fact upon which I certainly did insist, and his mode of pressing them was intellectually dishonest.

A Foolish Consistency

2006-08-11T16:03:00.000-04:00

"A foolish consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, but sometimes a principled one ought to be demanded ." Thus speaks Jonah, castigating Republicans for not encouraging Joe Schwarz to run as an independent. Because the ultimate story of Joe Lieberman is of course about the Republicans. It's not the fact that Joe Lieberman is the embarassing exception for those Democrats who want to impugn the motives of Republicans with regard to the war. It's a little tough when a nationally prominent Democrat continuing to stand behind the president. Remove the thorn in the side by defeating Lieberman in the primary, problem solved.

I would like to see Lieberman prevail, even over the Republican, because I don't want to see a Democrat run out of town on rails for taking what I view are reasonable positions. I plan to contribute to Lieberman's independent campaign for that purpose. If Jonah is so concerned about Joe Schwarz (maybe the reason that the consistency Jonah craves is lacking is that 99.9% of America has no idea who Joe Schwartz is, and whether he is a Congressman or plays third base for the Padres), I'm sure he'll cough up some money for any independent run he may make and would support him over his Democrat rival.

spacegirl Blasts Off

2006-08-10T11:17:00.000-04:00

I hope CCM's two co-contributors, one would-be contributor, and reader all will join me in welcoming our newest team member. Her handle is spacegirl, and she knows a thing or 2000 about US politics. As part of my deal with her, I can't say any more about her background, employment, height, turn-ons or turn-offs.

But I bet she'll give CCM some needed fuel, without causing us to lose any foam in the process.

Graber Calls out WaPo

2006-08-10T11:00:00.000-04:00

Mark Graber nails the major problems with the laments of supposed moderates about Lieberman's defeat. Highlights:

On issues as diverse as Iraq, the environment, and federal judicial selection, Mr. Lieberman was consistently unable to form a coalition of the center against the wings, largely because Republican moderates preferred to ally with Frist....

bipartisanship requires senators of both parties to cooperate, not simply senators of one party to weaken their party's capacity to oppose the other. Those who want bipartisan centrism need to promote independent candidates from all parties and expose Republican moderates who too often cave to their extremist leadership. A good case can be made that in the present political environment, centrism is more likely to be promoted by a Democratic party that uses every parliamentary tool in the books to oppose Republican initiatives until they are moderated, then by Democrats who when pronouncing a plague on extremists in both parties, make no actual contribution to diffusing the extremist policies of the right.

Graber also points out that while the Washington Post editorial he criticizes laments both Lieberman's loss and that of Joe Schwarz (a reportedly moderate Republican House member from Michigan who was beaten after an extensive campaign by the antitax-faith-and-wealth-based Club for Growth), the WaPo editorial promotes an independent run only by Lieberman. This is a very good point. I have seen no one suggest that Schwarz should run an indy campaign against his right-wing primary vanquisher. And I'm unaware of any lament about Schwarz's loss from the same GOP voices so sad about Lieberman's loss (e.g., Karl Rove, Dick "Lamont encourages bin Laden" Cheney, Tony Snow, and
Bu$h Ate My Baby). A foolish consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, but sometimes a principled one ought to be demanded .

Al From Jumps the Shark

2006-08-09T20:52:00.000-04:00

Just read his statement, as provided here. All I can say is that it shows that the DLC has made its way into parody. See Feingold's statement for the future of the Democratic party.

NYT Ed Board Gets it Right

2006-08-09T18:02:00.000-04:00

Here's the text of today's NYT editorial about former Democrat Joe Lieberman. Unlike some people who confuse reasoned exasperation with extremism, the NYT folks get the story exactly right. Read it, and let Joe and his mourners weep.

Revenge of the Irate Moderates
Published: August 9, 2006

The defeat of Senator Joseph Lieberman at the hands of a little-known Connecticut businessman is bound to send a message to politicians of both parties that voters are angry and frustrated over the war in Iraq. The primary upset was not, however, a rebellion against the bipartisanship and centrism that Mr. Lieberman said he represented in the Senate. Instead, Connecticut Democrats were reacting to the way those concepts have been perverted by the Bush White House.

Ned Lamont, a relative political novice, said he ran against Mr. Lieberman because he was offended by the senator’s sunny descriptions of what was happening in Iraq and his denunciation of Democrats who criticized the administration’s handling of the war. Many other people in Connecticut may have felt that sense of frustration, but no one else had the money and moxie to do what Mr. Lamont did. Mr. Lieberman was stunned to find himself on the defensive, and it was only in the last few weeks that the 18-year veteran mounted a desperate campaign to reclaim his party’s support.
Senator Lieberman says he will run as an independent in November, taking on Mr. Lamont and the Republican, Alan Schlesinger. Mr. Schlesinger is a very weak candidate, but Mr. Lieberman should consider the risk of splitting his party if the Republicans are able to convince Mr. Schlesinger to drop out of the race in favor of a stronger nominee.
Mr. Lieberman’s supporters have tried to depict Mr. Lamont and his backers as wild-eyed radicals who want to punish the senator for working with Republicans and to force the Democratic Party into a disastrous turn toward extremism. It’s hard to imagine Connecticut, which likes to be called the Land of Steady Habits, as an encampment of left-wing isolationists, and it’s hard to imagine Mr. Lamont, who worked happily with the Republicans in Greenwich politics, leading that kind of revolution.
The rebellion against Mr. Lieberman was actually an uprising by that rare phenomenon, irate moderates. They are the voters who have been unnerved over the last few years as the country has seemed to be galloping in a deeply unmoderate direction. A war that began at the president’s choosing has degenerated into a desperate, bloody mess that has turned much of the world against the United States. The administration’s contempt for international agreements, Congressional prerogatives and the authority of the courts has undermined the rule of law abroad and at home.
Yet while all this has been happening, the political discussion in Washington has become a captive of the Bush agenda. Traditional beliefs like every person’s right to a day in court, or the conviction that America should not start wars it does not know how to win, wind up being portrayed as extreme. The middle becomes a place where senators struggle to get the president to volunteer to obey the law when the mood strikes him. Attempting to regain the real center becomes a radical alternative.
When Mr. Lieberman told The Washington Post, “I haven’t changed. Events around me have changed,” he actually put his finger on his political problem. His constituents felt that when the White House led the country into a disastrous international crisis and started subverting the nation’s basic traditions, Joe Lieberman should have changed enough to take a lead in fighting back.

A Blow for Truth, Justice and the American Way

2006-08-09T13:46:00.000-04:00

Last night was a historic one, as Joe "Vichy" Lieberman can kiss his Senate seat goodbye. Instead of making googly eyes at BusHitler and writing him mash notes from the Senate floor, Ole Joe can spend his days pondering what makes the Democratic Party different from, and better than, the Rethuglicans -- things like not having been hijacked by extremists in the Party, like the ironically named Religious Right, and being beholden to ideological dogma from which one dare not stray, like tax cuts for the wealthiest .00001%. Because that type of approach will never let the Democrats retake control of the Congress in November. In fact, maybe he can join the Republicans, since he so obviously wants to be one of them, and maybe he can even run as their Vice Presidential candidate, so we can all vote against him, not just lucky Connecticut Democrats.

Lieberman Compares Bush To Bin Laden

2006-08-07T18:06:00.000-04:00

Hard to believe, eh?

But here's what MSNBC reports about Good Ol' Joe's Sunday night campaign event:

With former Sen. Max Cleland by his side to endorse him, Lieberman said Lamont’s treatment of him was “not unlike what the Republicans did to Max Cleland in his race for the Senate four years ago,” when the GOP used an ad of Cleland’s face morphing into Osama Bin Laden.

Presumably Lieberman is referring to this ad of Lamont's, in which video appears of George W. Bush with Lieberman's voice laid over it.

I guess Lamont's ad is "not unlike" the smear against Cleland, in much the same way as Joe Lieberman's rhetorical support of George W. Bush's presidency is "not unlike" Dick Cheney's. They have something in common, right?

But seriously: What a sad, self-pitying fool Lieberman has become.

Question for Conservatives: Does the Constitution Matter? Even a Little?

2006-06-26T17:37:00.000-04:00

According to this Boston Globe article (link found at this site put together by Virginia attorney Joyce A. Green and referenced at Balkinization), Senator Arlen Specter (R-promises a lot and typically delivers little unless it is important to WH and religious radicals) has scheduled a hearing for tomorrow on Presidential signing statements.

Others have written lots about this, so I won't belabor the details (see the detailed list of commentary at Green's site; I found the Gary Hart op-ed and Jack Balkin links particularly informative).

But here's the basic issue:

The US Constitution says that Congress enacts legislation.
The US Constitution also says that the President must either (a) sign, or (b) veto said legislation.

There isn't some third category -- yet President Bush has behaved as if there is one. Bush has made a practice of signing legislation while, in the process, issuing signing statements that declare his intention not to enforce specific provisions of Congress's enactment (as I understand it, Presidential signing statements have been around at least since the Reagan years, when they were championed by now-Justice Samuel Alito, among others). Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe has written that

President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.
Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, ''whistle-blower" protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research.

This conduct raises two issues. The second is whether the President's interpretation of the Constitution is correct in these specific cases. As applied to the relevant issues, that question is obviously of great importance.

But it pales by comparison to the first issue, which goes to the heart of the structure of the US government. Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution says that the President "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed". It does not say that President shall pick and choose which laws to execute. So what should the President do when confronted with a statute that he feels is unconstitutional? Let's be quaint and consult the Constitution itself, which in Article II, Section 1 states that

Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

It doesn't take much to realize, therefore, that if the President feels that a statute violates the Constitution, then he has not just the right but also the duty to veto that statute (for instance, suppose some future President were to lack the courage of the current one's convictions---surely the President would not want unconstitutional laws on the books when that pansy takes office).

The choice to sign an unconstitutional statute and then disregard its contents is simply not one that has any legitimate basis. Every time President Bush self-consciously refuses to enforce a law that he has signed, he defies his oath and his responsibility to the American people. (Cases when a different President signs a law likely are more complicated.)

There's been much talk on the left about impeaching Bush. While most of this talk is idle speculation, I'll take the liberty of taking it seriously for a moment. Should the President be impeached for misleading the nation into war? Well, maybe -- but then a lot of the people impeaching and judging him ought to first resign, since many were accomplices (given how little attention most paid to the details of the NIE before the war, the best that could be said might be that they were accessories).

Whatever you think about the war---even if you assume the worst about the President's duplicity leading up to it and willful incompetence in conducting it---it's much less of an affront to the President's obligations than is a policy of signing laws while announcing that you plan to disregard them and then actually disregarding them.

But don't just take my word for it. Conservative, former Reagan-administration lawyer Bruce Fein has been vocal on this issue. And he has a good idea:

Fein said he plans to tell the committee that it should include in all legislation a provision that cuts off funds for everything in the bill if a president uses a signing statement to exempt himself from following some part of the bill.

Of course, the President might simply disregard that provision as well -- why respect Congress's funding language if you disregard other facets of a law? But at least maybe it would be more difficult for Congress to duck its own Constitutional responsibility to hold the President accountability.

Which brings me to the views of another conservative. Back in September 2005, Peter wrote in a comment that

One could argue that one of the best rationales for the chief executive having the veto power is that he/she is charged with enforcing the law and if he/she believes it is unconstitutional, then he/she should veto it.

And to anticipate a possible rejoinder, no, the courts are not solely responsible for determining the constitutionality of a law. At least when considering the federal government, it is often said that each branch has a duty to ensure that laws are constitutional. Other branches shouldn't abdicate that responsibility simply because other branches also have that responsibility.

For precisely these reasons (which, incidentally, convinced me that I was wrong in the underlying post; see the update therein), the President has a duty to veto laws he really thinks are unconstitutional. Meanwhile, Congress has a duty to put a stop to the President's deliberate and publicly stated refusal to uphold his oath of office.

Perhaps I am naive. But I honestly do not understand how self-described conservatives can support a President whose stance toward the Constitution and the Legislative branch---which conservatives like to remind us is so much closer to the people than either the Executive or the Judiciary---is so cavalierly dismissive. If conservatives mean a word of their endless declarations and dissertations regarding the text and meaning of the Constitution, then surely they cannot abide this President's determination to ignore it.

It's put-up-or-shut-up time for conservatives, both in Congress and elsewhere: Do they stand for any principles at all? Or do they simply support whatever George W. Bush declares the President can do?

George W Sings

2006-06-25T23:30:00.000-04:00

Slap some big yellow specs on this biatch and Bono is cloned...

Even "Lovelier"?

2006-06-16T15:39:00.000-04:00

I have a general policy of ignoring nuts. That's why I haven't previously posted about Ann Coulter, about whom nothing but her name need generally be said to convey the lunacy.

That said, some people seem to find it worth discussing when leftwing nuts in other countries promote assassination of elected leaders.

Perhaps such people don't know about Ann Coulter's apparent suggestion that John Murtha is fit to be murdered by his own troops.

I can't help but wonder: Does it bother such people when rightwing nuts say such things? Do such people find it at all dismaying that mainstream media outlets give Coulter a platform to slander liberals? Or do such people make a stink only on those occasions when such people are overwhelmed by the horrors of supposed liberal bias?

I'm looking forward to hearing what such people think about Coulter's murderous suggestions and the continuing willingness of the supposedly liberal media to let her promote her books and her slander, lies and plagiarism.

Rove Gets Off (and not just by slandering opponents)

2006-06-14T09:00:00.000-04:00

So it appears that Karl Rove has been told that he won't be indicted (at lesat, that's what his lawyer has told the press---Fitzgerald's office has declined comment).

Here are some quick thoughts:

So much for the various GOP attacks on Fitz for supposedly being a partisan attack dog.
Obviously I don't know what Fitz knows. But from the stuff that has leaked out, there seems to be lots of reason to think that Rove did indeed lie to the grand jury. This fact raises the possibility that the apparent decision not to prosecute on obstruction or perjury charges is less absolution than it is concern on Fitz's part about whether Rove could be successfully prosecuted. So far I've seen nothing in Fitz's conduct but evidence that he is a stand-up guy who has followed his understanding of the law---which includes not charging when you don't think you can convict---and conducted himself with the utmost of decency. It's too bad his approach isn't more common in DOJ HQ. Kudos to Fitz for doing his job, and nothing more.
Rove is every bit the scoundrel folks like me have been saying he is. He lied to the American people about his role in blowing Valerie Wilson's cover. Hell, he actually was willing to blow her cover (so much for the supposed national security focus of this administration). Moreover, indictment or no, Rove was hardly eager to have the truth out, either to the GJ or to the American public.
George W. Bush's dishonesty and ducking of responsibility on this issue continues unabated---we all know he vowed that anyone involved in the Plame-Wilson leak would "no longer be in this administration". Scooter Libby would still be if not for his indictment, and Karl Rove still is. Dick Cheney still is, too. The dishonor and lack of dignity of this president and his thuggish henchmen continues, shaming us all.

In the meantime, it seems that Rove lawyer Robert Luskin may need someone else to get off. Here's one possible future client

Update: One more thing about which I've been wondering since Luskin started talking about this yesterday (I think). Have Rove's people released the letter from Fitz that they say they've received? Here's what VandeHei's WaPo story says (emphasis mine):

Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald told Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, in a short letter delivered Monday afternoon that he "does not anticipate seeking charges" against Rove in the case, Luskin said.

I haven't exactly scoured the wires on this issue, but I don't think any of the few things I have read has said that anyone (other than possibly Luskin) has seen this letter. If the letter exists , as I assume that it does even given the source of its reported existence, and if it's totally exonerative, why not release the whole thing? I see now that this point has also been made by Greg Sargent (HT TPMmuckracker.com), who managed to get Rove spokesman Mark Corallo on the record ducking exactly this question:

Corallo said this: "There were no conditions attendant to the prosecutor's actions. There never has been any discussion about cooperation or conditions or anything of the sort. This strictly reflects the prosecutor coming to the correct conclusion that Rove has told the truth from day one. He believed him."
I pointed out to Corallo that there's been plenty of speculation that Fitzgerald may have opted against charges not because he believed Rove, but because he didn't think he could prove any wrongdoing that may have occurred. When I asked Corallo if his above assertions should be taken to mean that the Rove camp had any sign that Fitzgerald hadn't merely opted against charges because he didn't think he could prove them, Corallo didn't answer directly. He said: "I think at that point you're splitting hairs."

[JG note: At this point I feel compelled to point out that Corallo was John Ashcroft's spokesman at DOJ in Ashcroft's salad days as AG of the USA (cue Spinal Tap music....). Corallo surely knows that the distinction between believing in innocence and not believing in the existence of proof of guilt is a substantive rather than hair-splitting one.]

Our conversation was brief, but I got a bit more out of Corallo. When I asked Corallo why the Rove camp wouldn't release Fitzgerald's notification that he wouldn't pursue charges, since that would clear up any doubts, he said, "We had an agreement with the prosecutor's office from the day this began that we wouldn't disclose direct communications or any documents between his office and ours."

But wouldn't today's announcement constitute a disclosure of such "direct communications"? To that question, Corallo replied that Fitzgerald had given them the go-ahead to release a statement. "He said he had no problem with it," Corallo said. Interestingly, he declined to answer whether Fitzgerald had signed off on the Rove camp's final statement.

You know, ongoing investigation, that sort of thing.

Barnes Hearts Bushies

2006-06-05T10:40:00.000-04:00

Fred Barnes, fillatist extraordinaire, has turned his velvet tongue on another Bush brother. Rigorous reporter that he is, Barnes discovers that Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is tops, Captain Dreamy, Mr. ``Governor in Chief.''

`` Why is Jeb Bush the best? It's very simple. His record is the best. No other governor, Republican or Democrat, comes close,'' Barnes declares, as he wrings out his spooge-rag.

The beginning of another Bush presidential candidacy? Now eternal recurrence is one thing, but this is getting friggin' ridiculous.

And The GOP Called Hillary A Carpet-Bagger

2006-05-26T10:14:00.000-04:00

I simply link to this report (well, editorial, really).

President Bush says he is the decider.

Lovely

2006-05-26T10:09:00.000-04:00

I simply link to report. You decide.

Future recipient of: A) presidential medal of freedom, B) presidential pardon, or C) both.

2006-05-24T20:39:00.000-04:00

The Exception Proves the Rule -- Republicans Are the Party of Corruption

2006-05-23T10:17:00.000-04:00

Louisiana Congressman William Jefferson doesn't seem to be a big fan of nuance. Videotaped accepting a $100,000 cash bribe, he was later found to have squirreled away $90,000 of it in his freezer. Nice touch.

One would hate for the fact that the Congressman happens to be a Democrat to interrupt the storyline that Republicans have a monopoly on corruption, though. Which is why we can thank NPR's Marketplace's show Morning Report yesterday for introducing a story on the Jefferson bribe scandal as follows: "The dark cloud of corruption that hangs over some powerful Republicans is swallowing up at least one Democrat as well" and ending the piece as follows: "Now, back to those Republicans."

So the dark cloud of corruption is swallowing up this Democrat because this Democrat is somehow linked to some other corruption scandal? Well, no. Jefferson seems to have been an independent contractor, accepting bribes from companies with business interests in Africa. So, this corruption scandal actually has nothing to do with any other scandal, on either side of the aisle? Well, yes. But Marketplace might as well try to continue the drumbeat that Republicans have cornered the market on corruption. Because we all know they have.

Real World: Congress

2006-05-03T16:54:00.000-04:00

Are you a Hill hottie? Because that hotness of yours demands a wider audience, doesn't it?

Don't grow old in the untelevized warren of committee offices and underground Capitol walkways. Stop wasting your considerable "talent" on flatulent plutocrats from every corner of America when you could be flexing your inner diva on the small screen...

Finally -- the Reality TV carcrash hits the people's house. Yes, you think-tankers are welcome to try out, too.

I've long favored simply another C-SPAN -- a C-SPAN XXX, where you can see lobbyists and members humping out hot legislative action in smokey back rooms. This won't be that. But I'm readying the VCR just in case.

Is there anything you can't find online?

2006-05-02T17:00:00.000-04:00

A relative just sent me to this site.

I was traumatized to see my driver's license online, complete with address and (semi-)accurate description.....

What's That In The Air? It Must Be War

2006-05-02T14:34:00.000-04:00

It looks as though the Bush Junta is sitting in Texas making up yet more fraudulent excuses for war to give Republicans a political boost. This time the illicit, unjustified and immoral war is against Iran, timed conveniently to help Republicans out in midterm elections with the God and Guns crowd. Will Bush stop at nothing to ensure Halliburton has access to more no-bid contracts, sacrificing America’s young in the process as a mere speedbump in the road to fill Dick Cheney’s already-overflowing coffers stuffed with illegal continuing Halliburton payments?

And what has Iran done to provoke the Chimp’s ire? Done poorly on a geography exam? Offered to help out some friends? Threaten to defend itself from untoward American aggression in the only way it can? Not threaten America if attacked by America?

Maybe the last is the real reason. We all know who’s pulling the strings when it comes to American foreign policy.

Bush has been in office six years, and in that span he will have started three, maybe four wars (watch your back, Canada) against innocent countries just minding their own business. All we can hope for is that Congress will execute their constitutional duty to impeach, so Bush can join First Bosom Buddies Ken Lay and Jack Abramoff in the slammer.

Snow Job in the White House

2006-04-27T13:41:00.000-04:00

With Tony Snow, recently appointed as the new White House spokeman, joining John Snow in the inner sanctum of the Bush junta, it's safe to say that Bush hasn't seen this much snow since he was doing lines off the backs of hookers back in the early 80s. With this move, Fox News has lost whatever shred of dignity and perceived objectivity it had even among the poor deluded right wing nut jobs who still think there was some connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq. How can anyone look at this Faux News revolving door between "objective mainstream media journalist" and "partisan shill" and argue liberal bias in the media? Snow just traded his and his "news network" respect at the door.

Mollohan Cocktail

2006-04-11T15:28:00.000-04:00

There's been some troubling discussion lately (starting, I think, with Saturday's front-page NYT article) about Rep. Alan Mollohan's finances. Mollohan is the ranking Democrat on the "Ethics" "Committee" (quotes for "Ethics" thanks to both Mollohan's apparent transgressions and to the GOP's inclusion of members on the "Committee" who gave money to Tom DeLay's legal defense fund; quotes for "Committee" because it doesn't bother meeting and appears totally dysfunctional).

I'm pressed for time and so can't write much. But I will say this:

The facts look bad. From what I've heard and read, they involve earmarks that went to nonprofits whose execs donated heavily to Mollohan's campaign and some of whom are in business with Mollohan and his wife
Mollohan should step down from the "Committee" at least temporarily (and probably permanently). It's absurd that he's the Dems' leading man on the "Ethics" "Committee". Failing to take a strong stand on this issue---as Pelosi has indeed failed to do---makes the Dems look every bit as hypocrital as the GOP (see Delay, Ney, Cunningham, Doolittle, etc) on this one case. If the Dems mean anything by their quite appropriate criticisms of the GOP's culture of corruption, then they'd better put their Mollohan where their mouths are. Moreover, taking a strong stand here would be good politics: Pelosi et al could say, "Hey, we don't take this garbage from our members---why should the American people take it from the GOP?" Mollohan is one guy. Cut him loose for the moment, and for the duration if the US Attorney's investigation turns up solid evidence of wrongdoing.
I was quite proud to hear both Al Franken and Melanie Sloan of CREW make all of these points on the Al Franken Show today (see CREW's statement on the matter for more; as a comparison, I wonder how many GOP pundits and GOP-aligned groups like CREW have pushed for Bob Ney to resign?)

George W and the Ooblek

2006-04-10T09:07:00.000-04:00

It truly pains me to get namby-pamby with BAMBY.

He swallows, hook line and sinker, the vilest bunk from the crew bound for the clinker. Cutting taxes for the rich helps the poor. Hate drilling in the Arctic? Don't be a Saudi-loving boor! No child left behind, but as for program funding let's agree to go blind. If you disagree with the president, it is with the terrorists you share a mind.

How can this bunch, so famous for screaming down is up, be wrong? The leak secured us and it was Wilson's claims that shot long. For you can easily see, Iraq posed all the threats W promised there'd be. The terrorists are on their knees and democracy is sprouting like a ripe weed.

America has no need for cheap migrant labor. We can preach morality and hate thy neighbor. The nation's parks aren't for nature. Hate the game, not the player.

So if we all throw up our hands, and toss sanity to the breeze, we can all say and do what we please. We can selectively leak and lie when we want. It doesn't matter when the president is an ignorant dilettante.

The Washington Post -- Part of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy

2006-04-09T08:16:00.000-04:00

Today's lead Washington Post editorial regarding the alleged "leak" scandal states as follows: "The material that Mr. Bush ordered declassified established, as have several subsequent investigations, that Mr. Wilson was the one guilty of twisting the truth. In fact, his report supported the conclusion that Iraq had sought uranium."

This same point was argued by Bu$h Ate My Baby many months ago, but would not be conceded by his esteemed posting colleagues. Yet now it is accepted as established fact by the Washington Post, which either means that the Washington Post can be as bamboozled and hoodwinked as yours truly, or maybe, just maybe, Mr. Wilson is in fact the one who should be doing some apologizing. Fat chance he or any of his water carriers will do so, but it's a nice thought.

Email I Sent to A Friend Today

2006-04-07T17:24:00.001-04:00

If you have a chance you should read this post over at Jack Balkin's blog, titled Reductio Ad Dictatoreum.

I have a vivid memory of having a debate with you on the day that Jose Padilla's enemy-combatant status was disclosed in the NYT. As I recall, I argued that the powers the President was claiming were at base dictatorial: once arrogated, these powers would make the President able to simply declare that a person no longer has any rights whatsoever. My recollection is that you said something to the effect of "Let's wait and see." (If I'm mischaracterizing, then I apologize.)

Balkin points out that yesterday's statement by AG Gonzales shows precisely the logical conclusion of the administration's inherent-authority theory justifying the various arrogations (enemy combatants, FISA-less domestic spying, etc).

Here is a particularly cogent excerpt:

...no law can keep the President from deciding to strip a U.S. citizen of ordinary Bill of Rights and statutory civil rights protections simply by asserting that the person is associated with Al Qaeda or with groups associated with Al Qaeda. To strip citizens of their rights in this fashion, the President does not have to prove his assertion to anyone. He need merely make it and then the person automatically loses his rights under the Constitution and statutory law.
Does this argument sound familiar? It should. It is the same argument that the President previously made to justify his ability to detain two U.S. citizens, Yasser Hamdi and Jose Padilla, in military prisons. Hamdi was captured in Afghanistan, but Padilla was detained in Chicago. Again, the President's argument doesn't distinguish between what he does overseas and what he does within the United States. As far as the President is concerned, if he thinks someone is associated with our enemies (or associated with someone associated with our enemies), he can, without offering any proof of this accusation to a disinterested third party, treat them as an enemy soldier. And, as we know, the laws of war permit enemy soldiers to be captured, detained, and even killed. So, at least in theory, if he could capture Padilla in Chicago, he could also shoot him there.
This theory, taken to its logical conclusions, gives the President the ability to treat anyone living in the United States, including particularly U.S. citizens, as wartime enemies without having to prove their disloyalty to anyone outside the executive branch. In so doing, it offers him what can only be called dictatorial powers-- that is, the power to suspend ordinary civil liberties protections on his say so. The limits on what the President may do under this theory are entirely political-- the question is whether the American people will stand for what the President has done if they discover what he has done in their name. But if the American people don't know what their executive is doing, they can hardly be in a position to object. And so the President has tried to keep secret exactly what he has done under the unreasonable and overreaching theory of Presidential power that his Administration has repeatedly asserted in its legal briefs and public statements.
Attorney General Gonzales' latest admission should hardly surprise us once we understand how much power the President actually thinks he has. Given that we will probably never know what the President has been doing in our name, we can only hope that he has not actually tried to exercise all the power he (wrongfully) thinks he possesses.

Four years thence, we have the President and his advisors asserting precisely the dictatorial powers about which I was worried. And here you have a leading scholar of constitutional law publicly declaring that the assertion of these powers is as great a threat from within to American democracy as there could be.

I'm not writing to say I told you so. Rather I'm writing to say that this terrible threat to freedom and American democracy will not stop unless "open-minded" people like you are willing to recognize it and say, "No more."

Today it is a few people with foreign-sounding names, some or all of whom may actually be terrorists.

Tomorrow it could be political opponents: I'll remind you that then-AG Ashcroft condemned the Administration's political critics in Senate testimony in 2001 (on Pearl Harbor Day, no less), saying that:

"To those who pit Americans against immigrants, citizens against non-citizens, to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve," Ashcroft told the Senate Judiciary Committee. "They give ammunition to America's enemies and pause to America's friends. They encourage people of good will to remain silent in the face of evil.

What happens if the President declares that these critics are, in fact, enemy combatants by dint of their "aid" to terrorists and the "ammunition" they give to America's enemies? On the underlying theory claimed to justify the Padilla detention.....Nothing.

It is quite ironic that the AG then stated

"Our efforts have been crafted carefully to avoid infringing on constitutional rights."

There are no consitutional rights under this Administration's reading of the Constiution.

It's time for everyone to recognize that fact.

Party now, pay later

2006-04-04T14:19:00.000-04:00

As we celebrate the dispatch of another political fathead -- even after Jim Wright, Newt, Trent Lott, Bob Livingston, etc etc, the thrill is always sharp -- and dance around the May pole celebrating another bloodless bloodletting at the top, we should remember what our domestic discontents mean beyond the ponds.

The frauds and lies of DeLay's cronies in private life are not coincidental to their politics -- it's all of a whole. The rot that has allowed so-called fiscal conservatives to roll out budget sham after budget sham stinks up DC but also wafts into the global trade winds. The capricious warmongering, the tears for the poor and the loot for the rich, the purple prose of republican democracy splattered across an arrogant religiosity -- we sane Americans are not the only ones who notice.

Watching this American political theater of the grotesque are investors, bond holders, bond buyers and central bankers the world over. They all know that the American titan is leveraged to the hilt, dependent on Chinese communists and Arab monarchs to make the rent. How much longer will they sit idle on their stumbling investment?

The United Arab Emirates and Qatar said they may buy euros with some of their combined $30 billion of foreign exchange reserves on expectations the currency will appreciate. The U.A.E., whose reserves rose almost 30 percent last year, may agree to buy more of the 12-nation currency at the central bank's May meeting, Sultan bin Nasser al-Suwaidi, the bank governor, told reporters in Abu Dhabi. The central bank governors of Kuwait and Qatar said they were reviewing the performance of the euro. (Bloomberg News)

Remember that talking about the positive performance of the euro is not so subtlespeak for discussing the inherent volatility underlying the dollar. When huge holders of U.S. currency and debt begin questioning their investments, we should all start to worry. Thanks to our current leadership, DeLay included, our solvency has been mortgaged for the sake of some get-rich-quick schemes for the already rich; for the sake of an empty war in the world's most potent powder keg of a region; for the sake of me, me, me over we. And now we have to worry about royals and commies pulling their financial support of us, the great battleship of democracy.

That said, the Hammer is hitting the slammer. Praise Allah and pass the eggrolls.

Grad Students Could Be Expelled For This

2006-04-03T17:19:00.000-04:00

As a casual consumer of the popular press discussions of global warming issues, I've gotten the impression that people generally can be categorized as follows:

Masses of people who are generally uninformed about the details, some of whom are willing to listen to all sides (I'd include myself in this group) and some of whom are unwilling to pay attention at all

People who are convinced that global warming is a serious problem, some of whom are professional scientists and some of whom are very interested lay-people

Republican partisans and energy-industry shills

Now, I would not say that all Republicans belong in category 3. Christie Whitman favored CO regulation, for instance (at least,before the president flip-flopped and embarassed her by showing just how little impact his EPA administrator really had). But from listening to and reading about Republicans like Senator James Imhofe (R-OK) and the energy-industry funded centers whose job seems to be to convince non-scientists (especially policymakers) that the scientists are all wrong, I get the sense that all too many Republicans have piled into category 3.

Enter George Will, who has a reputation for thinking deep thoughts (at least, when he tires of his search for septuasyllabic words). In yesterday's Washington Post, Will took a hatchet to the notion that global warming is a problem. His "argument" basically goes like this:

"[S]cientists and their journalistic conduits" are telling everyone to "Be worried, be very worried" about global warming.

Scientists and the media were really wrong in the 1970s, when they predicted and worried about a trend toward global cooling.

Since "they" said something 30 years ago that was wrong (point 2), we shouldn't listen to them (point 1) today. (Not only that, we should belittle them, since Will can't seem to write a column without belittling at least someone.)

In making his case regarding point 2, Will quotes several words from several 70s sources. Some of these quotes are from "regular" media like the NYT, while others are attributed to scientific publications like Science.

Well, it turns out that in at least one of these cases, Will is....full of hot air. His first piece of 1970s "evidence" for his "argument" is this:

Science magazine(Dec. 10, 1976) warned of "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation."

Pretty, damning, eh? Not really, actually.

Gilbert Martinez at Stanford Democrats did something that Will evidently couldn't be bothered to do: he read the article^* and correctly reported its conclusions in context. Here's the full paragraph from which Will's quotation was drawn, as well as the succeeding one, which is relevant to another part of Will's column:

Future climate. Having presented evidence that major changes in past climate were associated with variations in the geometry of the earth's orbit, we should be able to predict the trend of future climate. Such forecasts must be qualified in two ways. First, they apply only to the natural component of future climatic trends - and not to anthropogenic effects such as those due to the burning of fossil fuels. Second, they describe only the long-term trends, because they are linked to orbital variations with periods of 20,000 years and longer. Climatic oscillations at higher frequencies are not predicted.
One approach to forecasting the natural long-term climate trend is to estimate the time constants of response necessary to explain the observed phase relationships between orbital variation and climatic change, and then to use those time constants in the exponential-response model. When such a model is applied to Vernekar's (39) astronomical projections, the results indicate that the long-term trend over the next 20,000 years is towards extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation and cooler climate (80). [CCM Notes: Emphasis added; also, I pulled this text from climate modeler William Michael Connelly's website.]

The bolded and italicized parts of this quotation show that the authors of this paper, J.D. Hays, John Imbrie, and N.J. Shackleton, explicitly qualified their conclusion by distinguishing natural cooling trends from possible human-caused effects on the climate of fossil-fuel burning.

Of Will's seemingly impressive array of citations, one is theScience article just discussed, another comes from ScienceDigest, two come from the NYT, one from Newsweek,and one from the Christian Science Monitor. The one fromScience is the only one I've seen (and, knowing a bit aboutmathematical statistics myself, I would be impressed if, indeed,George Will had read and understood more than the summary of thispaper). Thus I can't vouch for the scientific-ness of the other articles, nor for whether Will has done his job and reported in at least a non-deceptive way what their authors said.

However, climate modeller William Michael Connelly writes (link originally from ThinkProgress):

The article was shamelessly misquoted to support the assertion that an "immenent" [sic] iceage was predicted. Actual reading of the article (an action not performed by those who cited it) shows that: it hedges its predictions by saying that these would be the tendencies in the absence of human perturbation of the climate system, that it predicts glacial conditions in 20,000 years time and that it predicts (again, assuming no human influence) a cooler trend over the next several thousand years (not glaciation within this timespan).

So now we have George Will quoting the shameless misquoters. For the non-technical reader of CCM, here's a baseball analogy to Will's deceptive/sloppy reporting here (I have no
idea which it is):

Actual facts of what happened in 1976: A pitcher throws a baseball in the general direction of a batter. The ball travels toward the batter. The batter swings the bat, hitting the ball, which changes direction and travels toward the outfield.
Scientist's results from a study designed to account for only the first part of what occurred in 1976 but that contemplates the second part: A ball was thrown toward a batter. Having been thrown with sufficient force, the ball's natural tendency would be to pass the batter - provided that the batter did not strike the ball, causing it to move away from the batter instead.

Hysterical sports journalist, late 1970s: New scientific evidence on baseballshows that pitched balls will no longer be hittable within 20 years!

Current scientist and/or sports journalist: Baseballs travel toward the outfield after being hit by batters.
George Will's hypothetical article involving selective quotation of 1976 scientific account:

Notwithstanding the hysterical heresies and surreptitiously pseudo-scientific silliness of present days, scenes played out peremptorily perchance as thusly lo 30 years whence: baseballs' "natural tendency would be to pass the batter."

Yet today, we find these supposedly sophisticated sophists verily contending that "Baseballs travel toward the outfield." Surely we must credit them nought.

Ok, that was gratuitous. But he deserves it.

Anyway, I don't know whether Will's conclusion is correct that we should ignore the uncertain - but potentially catastrophic - prospective costs of global warming because they have immediate, certain costs. That conclusion is inherently both normative and subjective. Normative because some people are more willing to bear catastrophic risks than others, and subjective because no one knows for sure the probability distribution over global warming's economic, environmental, health and social costs. Personally, I'm more willing than Will to buy insurance via smart climate regulations.

More relevantly to this post, though, I'm glad to distinguish myself from Will with a willingness to listen to today's scientists talk about today's science - rather than listening only to today's energy-industry apologists.

Will's column is a disgrace to his projected image as a no-nonsense realist who simply reports the hard facts as they are. At best, he has engaged in extremely sloppy journalism. At worst, he has deliberately misled his readers. He ought to be ashamed, and regardless of his intent, the Post should make him publish a column to explain what yesterday's column so artfully obfuscated.

^*Note: you will need a JSTOR subscription to access this link.

Also: See this link at RealClimate for links to more about George Will on this issues, and about the "global cooling myth".

In praise of army hotness

2006-04-03T16:22:00.000-04:00

The time-worn question of whose country has the hottest soldiers seems to be fully answered -- oy vey, has it ever.

But as you are ogling the Israeli Defense Force's finest, consider what it means when everyone -- hotties included -- has to serve in the military. Would we have gotten bogged down in Iraq?

Requiring military service is no guarantee of quagmire evasion -- consider Israel's bloody blunder into Lebanon. But when everyone's family is at risk of spilling blood abroad, would everyone be a little more engaged in the issues? Would we demand more explanations from our leaders when they rattle their sabers at shadows?

Would we be less inclined to intervene in those tragedies that history has begged us to step into?

Regardless of how you answer the above questions, there is no doubt that our military must look like our nation -- for fear that we begin a slippery slope tumble into Hessians/contractors fighting our wars for us. War is a nasty business, it should never be an easy option of simply writing a big check to get it launched. Our military must not simply echo the racial and religious composition of our country, but also its full economic and class range too. Wouldn't that make us, whether more trigger-wise or not, at the very least more American: more equal?

And let's face it, a little more hotness can't hurt.

1000lbs of turd poured into a suit

2006-03-24T17:54:00.000-05:00

Yes. I'm saying that the Vice President of the United States is not simply full of BS, he is composed of the stuff. His very skeleton and membranes are nothing but reformulated crap. And you too, Ric Keller. You were seen cheating on your wife. You've been seen running around in your tighty-whities not two blocks from your Orlando district office. Why are these bozos happening to America, lord? WHY?

By Brendan Murray and William Roberts March 24 (Bloomberg) -- Vice President Dick Cheney said Democrats have a ``sorry record'' on national security and suggested the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq they have suggested would fulfill the hopes of terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden.
``Leading Democrats have demanded a sudden withdrawal from the battle against terrorists in Iraq -- the very kind of retreat that Osama bin Laden has been predicting,'' Cheney said in Orlando at a fund-raising event for U.S. Representative Ric Keller, a Florida Republican.
``The leaders of the Democratic Party have decided to run on the theme of competence,'' Cheney said according to a transcript of the remarks his office distributed. ``If they're competent to fight this war, then I ought to be singing on American Idol.''
Where's Simon Cowell when you really need him?

Friday. Finally.

2006-03-24T11:44:00.000-05:00

Do you know the religious affiliation of your favorite super hero?

Did you know that the secretary of the U.S. Navy cannot actually deal with the nation's largest ship-builder, Northrop Grumman?

Ever wonder what a live-action Simpsons intro would look like?

Do you think the Catholic Church was upset by the DaVinci Code? You ain't seen nothing yet. (Not safe for work).

Just asking...

Norm Coleman channels North Carolina racist - rsvp now

2006-03-23T16:02:00.000-05:00

I, you, and the whole world can do more for international diplomacy by ordering in some Chinese food next Tuesday. This from the Heritage Institute:

Just a reminder that you cordially invited to hear Sen. Norm Coleman deliver the2006 Helms International Diplomacy Lecture at The Heritage Foundation's Allison Auditorium next Tuesday night at 6:30 p.m. This program is a joint venture of the Jesse Helms Center Foundation and the UN Foundation under the auspices of the Better World Campaign.
Note: RSVPs should be made by calling 202-481-6856 or via email to <mailto:RSVP@BGRDC.com> RSVP@BGRDC.com We look forward to having you join us!

Tell 'em Cornhuskerblogger sent you before plopping down in your seat, cracking open a Schlitz and loudly demanding ``more dancing girls.'' Or boys. Whatever floats your boat. I won't get all judge-y on you.

Can Jesus spin in his grave?

2006-03-21T10:16:00.000-05:00

Sunday's NYT Magazine piece on the Liberty University Debate Team had CHB's attention. I had the honor of chatting up the Rev. Falwell on the matter of his debate team a year or so ago. His pride in the team is obvious to anyone listening: his voice swells, he gets emotional and all up-with-kids on you.

But i'm sure his fat face would shake with sin-fearing rage were he to learn that his beloved debate coach, Brett O'Donnell lied. O'Donnell is a legend among college debating coaches. His claim to fame rests equally on his having helped coach George W. Bush for the 2004 presidential debates.

While soaking up all the GOP-loving attention, O'Donnell claimed he was ``Dr. Brett O'Donnell,'' citing a Ph.D from Penn State University. Jesus knows better -- and so too does the administrative brass in Happy Valley. O'Donnell holds a Master's Degree. Did he confess his sins? Nope, he just buried 'em. Liberty U scrubbed its website clean of "Dr." references around O'Donnell -- but the magic of Google helped unscrub the obfuscation.

Friday Fun: the Sistani Edition

2006-03-17T14:34:00.000-05:00

If like me you've wondered just what Grand Ayatollah Uzma Sistani thinks about things, all kinds of things, you're in luck. Yes, the one indispensable figure in Iraq's struggle towards stability has something to say about virtually everything.

The guy's a nut, but he's the best nut we have in this bridge mix. And you can't fault him for thinking things through -- whether you agree or not, the guy has spared no detail it seems. Well, at least one. Browse for yourself.

So this is what $200 billion and counting bought us -- the thin hopes of Bush's democratic putsch in the Middle East now rest upon a thin, aged, radical religious freakshow who happens to be less bloodthirsty than his peers. In any event, he's not long for this world -- age and civil war are conspiring against him. If he isn't in your death pool by now, you're a total stooge.

Claude Allen: hero?

2006-03-13T12:52:00.000-05:00

It's been fun to laugh at Claude Allen's expense. But in all seriousness, it's time to confirm outlier status on the guy and sing his praises. He is the closest thing this administration has to a Robin Hood.

While virtually everyone else in the Bush White House has been busy selling out rank and file Americans on behalf of the nation's most powerful corporate interests, lone Claude Allen played along. But all the while he was striking blow after blow against the corporate machine. His low-bore criminal behavior (what's shoplifting some electronics when weighed against conspiring to send thousands of Americans to their death in a fraudulent war?) took its bite-sized tolls on the bottom line of Big Business while the little guy (in this case, Claude Allen himself -- but also, no doubt, the other Allens who would benefit from a large screen t.v., dvd player, etc etc) reaped the benefits.

It's not quite stealing from the rich to help the poor, but it is stealing from the big rich corporations to help the not-stinking-rich (our Robin Hood pulled down a $160,000 annual salary, considerably more than that mythic arrow-slinger from merry ol' youknowwhere.) So let's give credit where it is due.

Brave, brave Sir Allen...

Schadenfreude, Thy Name is Allen

2006-03-10T19:07:00.000-05:00

Some of CCM's 3 readers may remember the case of Claude Allen. Having been a player in the Virginia state government (if memory serves, he ran their welfare department), Allen became DepSec of the US Department of HHS when George W. Bush took (and I do mean took) office in 2001. In 2003, Allen was nominated to sit on the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit. Back then, Democrats ran the Senate, and his nomination never got a vote.

During the period between Allen's nomination and his nomination's eventual lapse, Allen's GOP supporters made some noise about how Democrats were opposing Allen because he was black rather than because of his judicial qualifications, temperament, etc. [Update: an informed source has explained to me that the initial opposition to Allen among Senate Dems was due to a dispute over which states should get 4th Circuit seats---Allen is from Virginia, whereas Maryland's Democratic senators wanted a Maryland native appointed. I don't know how much of the later opposition was substantive. My understanding is that such disputes are not uncommon.] For instance, Peter Kirstanow wrote on NRO that

Special vituperation, however, seems to be reserved for minority nominees suspected of being pro-life. Estrada, Rogers Brown, Claude Allen, and Levanski Smith were/are among these apostates. Pro-life minority nominees represent the perfect storm for Left-leaning opposition groups: non-conformist role models from the Left’s most reliable voting blocs who may one day be in a position to reconsider Roe v. Wade. Better to filibuster them than to have a televised debate on the Senate floor that might raise interesting and useful questions concerning the merits of monolithic minority support for one party or an unyielding defense of Roe.

And here's what C. Boyden Gray, who's been leading the charge for activist, axe-grinding Bush nominees in the most ad hominem of ways, had to say about Allen on July 7, 2004:

Claude Allen promises not to advance a political agenda from the federal bench he has been nominated to, but to be the type of judge who buttresses the foundation of American government — by applying the rule of law however he finds it. President Bush, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, could do much worse than Allen. By the grace of democratic principles overriding a minority in the Senate, let us hope they do not have to.

"The type of judge who...appl[ies] the rule of law however he finds it."

Turns out he applies the "possesion is nine-tenths of the" rule of law on all sorts of things he finds:

When Claude Allen, President Bush's longtime domestic-policy adviser, resigned suddenly on Feb. 9, it baffled administration critics and fans. The White House claimed that Allen was leaving to spend more time with his family....

News today may shed light on the mystery of Allen's resignation. According to the Montgomery County Police Department, Allen was arrested yesterday and charged in a felony theft and a felony theft scheme. According to a department press release, Allen conducted approximately 25 fraudulent "refunds" in Target and Hecht's stores in Maryland. On Jan. 2, a Target employee apprehended Allen after observing him receive a refund for merchandise he had not purchased. Target then contacted the Montgomery County Police. According to a source familiar with the case, Target and the police had been observing Allen since October 2005.

See this Slate article for more.

Can't help but notice that as recently as February 9, 2006, Andrew T. Hyman, blogging at ConfirmThem, wrote

Rumor has it that Milan Smith is the leading prospect to succeed Judge Tashima in the Ninth Circuit. Regarding a successor for Judge Murnaghan in the Fourth Circuit, I hope that UVA Law Professor Caleb Nelson will be considered, as well as Claude Allen who was previously nominated for that seat.

I wonder if Mr. Hyman is still hoping....I also wonder if Boyden Gray still thinks Claude Allen is the right sort of Judge for America. You know, private property rights and all---usually kind of a key factor for the sorts of charming, well-dressed millionaire supporters of President Bush whom Robert Novak likes to lionize.

Novak Should Quit the Day Job

2006-03-10T12:09:00.000-05:00

For unintentional comedic achievement, you just have to admire yesterday's Robert Novak column. I don't have the time to go through all the laugh lines, but the best might be this one:

Although he is the target of relentless assaults from Democrats, Bush dreams of replicating in chilly Washington the warmer political climate of Austin.

Riiiiiiggghhhht: Try as he might, George W. Bush just doesn't seem to be able to convince those mean old Democrats to join him in forging a bipartisan approach to solving America's problems together. So naive, that political peacemaker George.

Ok, I can't help it. Here's another:

So, why would the President think Rubin would help him? Perhaps Bush was naive and misled by superficial impressions. Rubin, now chairman of Citigroup, is a handsome, well-dressed, soft-spoken, charming multi-millionaire whom Bush might have mistaken for one of his rich Republican friends from Texas.

Got that? "Rich Republican Bush friend from Texas"="handsome, well-dressed, soft-spoken, charming multi-millionaire".

No wonder that man of the people, George W. Bush, was fooled by Robert Rubin....he didn't look like one of those facially scarred street ruffians who can't string together a sentence in proper English.

Ken Lay, Bob Rubin....hard to tell them apart I guess.

Save us from our own legislation!

2006-03-10T11:59:00.000-05:00

For sheer hypocritical chutzpah, it's hard to beat this letter to the editor publlished in the March 9 NYT:

To the Editor:

Re "Scant Drop Seen in Abortions if Parents Are Told" (front page, March 6):

The story is not whether statistics document a drop in teenage abortions after passage of parental involvement laws.
The real story revealed in your article is that abortion-clinic workers have witnessed parents threatening physical violence against their pregnant teenage daughters if the girls do not agree to an abortion.

Surveys of women having abortions find that 6 to 8 percent report their reason for aborting is that their parents want them to.
So much for reproductive rights and freedom of choice.
Perhaps we need a new round of state laws protecting teenagers who are coerced into abortion by their parents. Now that would be a story!
Carrie Gordon Earll
Director, Issue Analysis
Focus on the Family
Colorado Springs, March 6, 2006

Here it is, a bit more briefly:

We want laws to force teens to tell their parents that they're pregnant if they want to be able to get an abortion---because parents have a right to know and make decisions about their children's medical choices!
We get those laws.
We find out that some parents want their daughters to get an abortion!
We certainly don't conclude that our law is working as planned. No, we propose a new law that prevents parents whose choices differ from our own from realizing those choices!
Summary: when our law works as intended but in the wrong direction, demand a new law to make sure that our original law's effects are prevented from occurring!

At least South Dakota's legislature is intellectually honest.

Note: For the record, I do not think that parents should be allowed to force their children to have undesired abortions. Just as I do not think that religious extremists and their allies should be allowed to force women to carry pregnancies to term.

Update: Ok, I admit "briefly" is probably inapt. So how about "honestly"?

Enceladus: untouched by W...

2006-03-09T15:40:00.000-05:00

D.C.'s real estate market taugh the CHBs a powerful lesson: buy early or don't buy at all. So maybe a little place near the beach....

Celebrate

2006-03-08T08:47:00.000-05:00

To all the girls, er, women, i've loved before...

And he's still got his pension...

2006-03-04T11:32:00.000-05:00

Wielding high public office to defraud the taxpayers, impair the national defense and squeeze out millions of dollars in loot: 8 years and four months.

Wielding a cell phone to rob some banks of a few thousand dollars: 12 years.

Duke Cunningham's sentence set a new mark for Congressional shame. And yet his prison term doesn't measure up to that of a two-bit bank heist by a crazy chica.

Laura Bush poses with members of the Bush cabinet

2006-03-02T12:24:00.000-05:00

CHB may be mistaken, but since when did Rumsfeld begin wearing the bows in his hair?

How to make a Nebraskan hurl?

2006-03-02T12:18:00.000-05:00

It's easy...read this.

The face that only an anorexic could love...

Don't pick up the soap, Congressman

2006-03-02T10:43:00.000-05:00

As CHB awaits Rep. Randy Cunningham's sentencing -- the first in what promises to be a Niagara-like cascade of prison sentences coming down the Grand Old way -- he is reminded of an old story about the Dukestir's conception of self.

Soon after Cunningham piloted his way to a congressional seat, he took to dining out at House-side eateries and bars on the Hill. He relished his time at the head of such tables, enjoyed being the big man in D.C. And he didn't like to pay his tab. Even when a restaurant manager reached his congressional office to plea for remittance, Cunningham thundered ``Don't you know who i am?''

Soon, he'll be another convinct with a number. That's who he is.

Let's make sure the tide of corruption and lies is fully rolled back. And that means not being satisfied sweeping away merely the turdburglars like Cunningham, whose vanity and rotten soul played like nefarious drama on a high stage. There are still higher stages upon which even bolder acts of craven nogoodery were committed.

AG or not AG - is that really a question?

2006-02-23T21:12:00.000-05:00

ThinkProgess is linking to this report that says

In a court filing, lawyers for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby said the indictment violates the Constitution because Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald was not appointed by the president with the consent of the Senate.

The defense attorneys also said Fitzgerald's appointment violates federal law because he was not supervised by the attorney general or approved by Congress.

Obviously, I'm no lawyer. But this one strikes me as the Mary-est of Hails. Here's the body of the December 30, 2003, letter James Comey wrote to Fitz when Comey appointed him to the position of Special Counsel:

By the authority vested in the Attorney General by law, including 28 U. S .C. §§ 509, 510, and 515, and in my capacity as Acting Attorney General pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 508, I hereby delegate to you all the authority of the Attorney General with respect to the Department's investigation into the alleged unauthorized disclosure of a CIA employee's identity, and I direct you to exercise that authority as Special Counsel independent of the supervision or control of any officer of the Department.

Comey was Acting AG at the time due to John Ashcroft's recusal. I'm guessing that Libby's filing would mean that you couldn't have Acting AG's at all, since any person serving as Acting AG would ex hypothesi not have been nominated by the President nor confirmed by the Senate as non-acting AG. Thus I don't see how AG recusals would ever be possible under Libby's theory of the law.

Let's assume it turns out that Comey cited real and controlling statutes in his letter to Fitz, so that Fitz was legitimately appointed Acting AG. Then it's obvious that the contention that Fitz "was not supervised by the attorney general or approved by Congress" is worse than a non-sequitur: Fitz is the AG for purposes of this investigation, and he was made AG by (someone who was made AG by) the AG who was indeed nominated by POTUS and confirmed by the Senate.

So either this is a Hail Mary or, more likely, it's meant to stall while throwing red meat---however maggot-infested---to the talk radio denizens.

PraiseBeHisName@Yahoo.com?

2006-02-22T15:40:00.000-05:00

Much has been made recently of Google's collaboration with the Chinese to limit the scope of the powerful internet search engine within mainland China. Republicans got all up in arms about it, finding the issue perfectly suited to their red-bashing tastes. That's all well and fine, but you can't shake hands with the devil and then pretend he ain't your friend.

So let me move on to a less remarked upon instance of corporate cowardice -- the case of Yahoo banning the use of ``allah'' in email names, even if those sensitive five letters are buried within another name.

I've spoken briefly of the Allah cartoon flap, and i decided that i'm not sure how i stand on the actual publication of the offensive cartoons. Yes, i know, very brave of me.

But the point is it ain't easy...it's particularly hard because the impetus to run some of these cartoons seems to have been merely the urge to offend a key demographic. Just run porn if offending people gives you your jollies, people.

But this seems to test the limits of tolerance, from the other end. CHB was once accused of religious insensitivity for using the word ``pigskin'' when speaking to religious Jews. The context was straight forward: a football game. But you'd think that innocent ol' CHB had actually force-fed these people pork rinds or something.

I'm offended every day -- twice last Thursday, when i had the misfortune of coming face to face with John Ashcroft on two separate occassions. It was not an entirely pleasant experience. But such is life. We try to make lemonade out of lemons, not molotov cocktails.

Powerball drops on the hometown

2006-02-19T13:49:00.000-05:00

Just try and tell this Husker that Nebraska isn't charmed...